tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84300729991755693192023-11-15T07:53:13.150-08:00The Things I Do For LoveRereading <i>A Song of Ice and Fire</i>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125truetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-20323962003461560762016-06-29T13:02:00.000-07:002016-06-29T13:02:01.401-07:00<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.00784314); color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, serif; text-indent: -15px;">Was it your hand they hacked off in Harrenhal, or your manhood? - </span><i>A Storm of Swords</i>, Chapter 72 (Jaime IX)</blockquote>
<br />
These words from Cersei to Jaime, spoken in anger when he refuses have sex with her in the White Sword Tower, or murder Tyrion on her behalf, are an echo of Jaime’s own thoughts after his maiming, and I would argue that they (and the many other times - especially in <i>A Feast for Crows</i> - that Cersei equates Jaime’s loss of his hand to his loss of masculinity) are equally as important in the deterioration of the twins’ relationship as Jaime’s mantra of sexual jealousy (Lancel and Osmond and Moonboy) and Cersei’s increasing paranoia about anyone who disagrees with her.<br />
<br />
Westeros, of course, is a place filled with what some people call “toxic masculinity” (I prefer to call it “hegemonic masculinity” mostly because I really like Gramsci). Whatever you want to call it, this is a value system that creates an ideal of masculinity defined by certain characteristics like violence and aggression, emotional restraint/repression, physical courage and toughness, risk-taking/thrill seeking, competitiveness with other men, and a narrowly defined version of “success.” (As we see with Sam, or Tyrion, being less than physically perfect, being afraid of violence or aggression, caring more about books, etc., are all things that make you less than a man.)<br />
<br />
When Jaime is maimed, he completely buys into the idea of hegemonic masculinity. Let them kill me, so long as I die fighting. Jaime attempts to give himself that “good” death, by fighting Hoat’s men with his left hand, a suicidal move if they actually intended to kill him. And when that fails, he gives up, willing himself to die. Without his hand, without his sword, he sees himself as no longer a man, no longer a person (why would the stars want to look down on such as me?)<br />
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And at that moment, Brienne, whose very existence challenges the concept of hegemonic masculinity (more on that later), gives Jaime a different path, a new way of looking at the world. She does it very simply - with two words: Jaime and craven.<br />
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Brienne calls Jaime by his name for the very first time right at this juncture, when he’s decided that there is no value to his life beyond his skill with a sword, and therefore he should just die. Names are <b>important </b>(”you have to know your name” from a different storyline, Reek doesn’t become Theon again until he rescues the false Arya, the real Jeyne), and here, Brienne is showing us (and Jaime) that she sees him as an individual, a person, not just “the Kingslayer/oathbreaker” or “Jaime Lannister, Tywin’s son, or a Lion of the Rock or any of the other shells that Jaime has built up and hidden behind all of these years. Brienne has experienced Jaime’s physicality in a very concrete way (she’s cleaned him up when he vomited after the Brave Companions gave him horsepiss to drink; she’s cleaned him when he soiled himself) and she is seeing him as a human being in pain, not as the embodiment of a role (warrior, knight, enactor of masculinity) - and this touches Jaime (who has just wondered what worth he has as a person) enough that he keeps listening.<br />
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And then Brienne asks him if he’s so craven that he can’t imagine living without his sword hand. That, of course, is exactly the problem that faces Jaime; he cannot imagine such a life.<br />
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In asking this question, Brienne is challenging another aspect of hegemonic masculinity, the idea that physical courage is the highest attainment, a man must be physically brave or not be a man (this is something Jon and the other NW boys think about Sam when they first meet him, because Sam challenges all those ideas of masculinity, but Jon does reflect that it must take a lot of courage for Sam to admit that he’s a coward.) Jaime has plenty of physical courage; that has never been in doubt. But Brienne’s words make him wonder whether he has any other kind of courage (because it will take courage for Jaime to go forward as a cripple, knowing exactly how a cripple is valued in Westeros; that is not only what Jaime’s brother has experienced his entire life, but exactly what he personally thought when he crippled Bran, when he told Tyrion that it was better to have a good clean death than to live as a cripple).) Jaime makes a choice here, to listen to Brienne, to live and go on and learn how to live as someone who no longer measures up to the idealized masculinity of Westeros. (This, by the way, is why I straight-up hate that Show!Brienne asks Jaime if he’s a “bloody woman” for “whining and crying” about losing his hand. That simply reinforces that Real Men Don’t Cry and only women are whiny and weepy and … just NO!)<br />
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Brienne’s challenge to Jaime to live, and to find other ways to be courageous, of course has an almost immediate payoff for her personally, (though that is not in the least why she says what she says). A Lannister always pays his debts. Jaime pays his debt to Brienne by saving her from rape and from death and to do so, he has to figure out how to protect her without a sword or a swordhand. The first time, he uses his wits (calling out “sapphires”) to save her from rape; then he uses his maimed and blemished body as Brienne’s shield (the body that Brienne will later remember as simultaneously godlike and corpselike, beautiful and monstrous.) It’s not a coincidence that Jaime’s most heroic moment in the series (so far) is a subversion of all of those stories where knights save maidens from monsters: Jaime saves Brienne from the bear by placing his (Lannister, and therefore precious to his father) body in front of hers, because he can’t defend her any other way.<br />
<br />
Book!Brienne challenges hegemonic masculinity in multiple ways (she is physically tough and brave, but she also values songs and stories - a characteristic she shares with the very feminine Sansa Stark; she is skilled with a sword, but she is also gentle and nurturing when she cares for Jaime after his maiming) and that seems to make her very existence an affront to men like Randyll Tarly (perhaps the epitome of a “man’s man” and an all around nasty but of goods.) Of course we meet Wildling women and of course the Mormont ladies in the North, and to some extent, Asha Greyjoy (though she is also much more conventionally attractive and sexy than Brienne) who also fight AND do feminine things (alas, Dacey Mormont in her dress!) but they are denizens of the periphery of Westeros (beyond the Wall; Bear Island; the Iron Islands), rather than its heartlands, which are, not coincidentally, the heartlands of the chivalric system and its idealization of specific masculine and feminine roles.<br />
<br />
I would argue as well that Jaime is more receptive to Brienne’s message because he is a lot less sexist than many of the other men in Westeros, by virtue of his lifelong connection to Cersei, whom he sees for a long time as his other self. If I were a woman, I’d be Cersei, is what Book!Jaime thinks (as opposed to the show’s “I’m not a woman, thank the Gods!” which is <b>quite</b> a different viewpoint!!) But his journey with Brienne, even before he loses his hand, actually shows us a Jaime who’s not particularly hung up on gender roles. Oh, sure, he says some nasty things about Brienne’s appearance (and thinks even more of them, though he also thinks early on that her eyes are “pretty and calm”) but he is also cognizant right from the beginning of her determination (the incident with Robin Ryger), her shrewd read of a situation (at the inn), and her strength and skill (the duel). He comes to respect both Brienne’s traditionally masculine attributes <b>and</b> her feminine ones (in this light, she could almost be a beauty; in this light, she could almost be a knight), and by the climax of their journey, in the bear pit, I would argue that he really sees her as an equal. He is perfectly fine with letting her save herself (in fact, he believes she can vanquish the bear, no problem, until he realizes that she’s essentially armed with a wooden stick, which is when he does what he can to help her.)<br />
<br />
When they return to King’s Landing, Jaime vouches for Brienne’s honor to Loras without a second thought, even though … well, it’s a bit revolutionary to have a maiden’s honor NOT be about her virginity, but about the fact that she’s telling the truth about not killing Renly. It’s almost as though Jaime sees Brienne as a person (in the way that she saw him as a person) rather than as a flagrant breaking of gender norms!<br />
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And then he gives her his sword, the sword his father gave him, in effect ignoring the fact that Jaime isn’t a “man” by Westerosi standards any more, and there are countless layers of metaphor here, besides the very obvious sexual one. For one thing, he is giving over his role as the knight in the story to Brienne; he names the sword Oathkeeper FOR HER and she later thinks that it’s a sword fit for a hero (which she is, but bless her, she just doesn’t see that about herself.) For another, it’s a very <b>Lannister-</b> looking sword, so he’s also giving the true knight *his* favor (in a reversal of all the narratives of chivalric tourneys, where the lady gives the knight her favor). And lastly, he gives Brienne the sword and a quest not just for Sansa Stark but for Jaime’s own “last chance for honor ; - all three things, sword, quest and honor explicitly tied into hegemonic masculinity; all three things entrusted to a woman. (And lest anyone think I am saying that Jaime sees Brienne as brother-in-arms or whatever, I'm not. This is the culmination of a scene in which Jaime admires the fit and color of her <b>gown</b>, and thinks that it brings out the blue of her astonishing eyes.) Just as in his dream, he sees her both as a woman and a knight; he doesn’t think the one precludes the other, or that Brienne can't be a hero. And Brienne … Brienne turns right around with a compliment to him, rejecting some of her earliest words to him about soiling his white cloak by telling him in this scene that his cloak looks good on him. That he is suited to wear honor and vows and all the knightly things she admires (and that he knows she admires) <b>right </b>after Cersei has explicitly told him that he isn’t a man any more.<br />
<br />
In short, Jaime’s road from Riverrun to Pennytree is filled with this push and pull of what it means to be a man and a quest for identity, and Brienne and Cersei are part of that. By the end of <i>A Storm of Swords</i>, when he writes in the White Book about Brienne's returning him to King's Landing, he has fully accepted her as a knight. He spends <i>A Feast for Crows </i>losing Cersei as his ideal of womanhood, and during his one all-too-brief chapter in <i>A Dance with Dragons, </i>he says that he looks for "innocence" in a woman - we will find out in <i>The Winds of Winter </i>whether Jaime sees Brienne not just as a knight, and as an "innocent", but as a woman whom he can love. I think everything in this storyline leads towards that, towards Jaime's acceptance of his own limitations, and his ability to reshape himself to be a man who can love and respect Brienne, but we shall see!Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-30943809803488499382016-06-22T12:54:00.000-07:002016-06-22T12:54:01.830-07:00<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0.00784314); border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; text-indent: -7px; vertical-align: baseline;">All of it came pouring out of Brienne then, like black blood from a wound: the betrayals and betrothals, Red Ronnet and his rose, Lord Renly dancing with her, the wager for her maidenhead, the bitter tears she shed the night her king wed Margaery Tyrell, the melee at Bitterbridge, the rainbow cloak the the had been so proud of, the shadow in the king's pavilion, Renly dying in her arms, Riverrun and Lady Catelyn, the voyage down the Trident, dueling Jaime in the woods, the Bloody Mummers, Jaime crying "Sapphires", Jaime in the tub at Harrenhal with steam rising from his body, the taste of Vargo Hoat's blood when she bit down on his ear, the bear pit, Jaime leaping down onto the sand, the long ride to King's Landing, Sansa Stark, the vow she'd sworn to Jaime, the vow she'd sworn to Lady Catelyn, Oathkeeper, Duskendale, Maidenpool, Nimble Dick and Crackclaw and the Whispers, the men she'd killed ...</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0.00784314); border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; text-indent: -7px; vertical-align: baseline;">"I have to find her," she finished. "There are others looking, all wanting to capture her, and sell her to the queen. I have to find her first. I promised Jaime. Oathkeeper, he named the sword. I have to try to save her ... or die in the attempt." </span>- Brienne VI (Chapter 31), <i>A Feast for Crows</i>, George R. R. Martin</blockquote>
<br />
By the middle of <i>A Feast for Crows, </i>it's incredibly clear that Brienne is completely in love with Jaime Lannister:<br />
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1. “The vow she’d sworn to Jaime, the vow she’d sworn to Lady Catelyn” - these are conflated in her mind now. She is finding Sansa Stark for Lady Catelyn AND for Jaime Lannister - and her vow to the living man, for whom Sansa Stark is “my last chance for honor,” comes first. The quest for Jaime’s honor, because she knows him, because she watched him change before her eyes, and saw the man underneath his monstrous reputation, because he risked himself for her more than once: this vow is one that Brienne takes incredibly seriously. (Yes, of course, quite a few times during the course of Brienne’s inner monologue, she does feel compassion, and fear, and dedication to Sansa, but given that Brienne has never met Sansa, this is a more generalized compassion for others, which is certainly something Book!Brienne has in spades. Brienne is “beautiful” because she certainly can put herself in other people’s positions and she can imagine all of Sansa’s fear and anxiety in the face of the danger she’s in. I’m not saying that Sansa doesn’t matter to Brienne, but oaths matter too, a LOT, and the oaths are about Jaime and Catelyn.)<br />
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2. “I promised Jaime. Oathkeeper, he named the sword. I have to try to save her ... or die in the attempt.” When Brienne loves you, she will give her life for you. She dedicated herself to Renly’s service because he was nicer to her in public than any other non-related man had ever been; Jaime gives her a Valyrian sword and entrusts his honor into her keeping and vouchsafes HER honor to Loras Tyrell, which is like orders of magnitude greater than “being nice.” Over the course of their Riverlands journey, Brienne has learned that Jaime has a different side to him, that he was once just as concerned about honor, chivalry and oaths as she is; when he gives her Oathkeeper and her quest, he is entrusting her with something else as well: his fragile, newly rediscovered honor, and Brienne recognizes how precious this gift is (because she was in a sense the catalyst for his rediscovery of himself). In return, she will fulfill her quest or die trying because, well, Jaime and his honor mean that much to her.<br />
<br />
3. “Jaime in the tub at Harrenhal with steam rising from his body” - clearly SOMEONE made quite the impression on Brienne (it’s so funny in retrospect that Jaime thinks the “wench” is just being surly and gets in the tub with her in part to annoy her, and then we find out from Brienne’s POV that she was speechless because despite everything he’d been through, Jaime’s body was at least half godlike when he got into the tub with her. And she sure remembers that body.) I find it extremely amusing that she’s telling ALL of this to the Elder Brother, including her lustful thoughts about Jaime's naked body.<br />
<br />
<br />Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-9984519405888737752016-06-20T12:42:00.000-07:002016-06-20T12:42:00.161-07:00Courtly love and loathly maidens<br />
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<header class="post-header"> <h1 class="post-title">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I've talked before about the trope of "courtly love" with Jaime and Cersei,
because they are a wonderful, twisted version of something we have seen a
lot in literature before (Guinevere/Lancelot, Tristan/Isolde) and
there’s even a precedent for their relationship in Westerosi history
with Prince Aemon the Dragonknight (member of the Kingsguard, which he
joined because he wanted to be near his sister) and his sister Queen
Naerys, and a widespread belief that her children were actually Aemon’s,
not those of her husband the King. (So Jaime isn’t quite so crazy when
he tells Cersei that the Targaryens did it too, whether he means incest, or cheating on the king, and passing of their children as his.)</span></span></h1>
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I want to talk more specifically on somewhat more obscure
Arthurian tale that is very interesting in terms of Jaime/Brienne, that
of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall. It’s also a bit of a Beauty and the
Beast tale (mirroring Jaime/Brienne, because the man is the beauty, and
the woman is the beast, physically, in this one!) but where Beauty
breaks the Beast’s enchantment by falling in love with him, Gawain
breaks Ragnall’s enchantment by holding to his promises and <em>respecting</em> her
as an individual, which is where I think the similarities come in to
Jaime/Brienne.<br />
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You can read the <a href="http://www.sfsu.edu/%7Emedieval/romances/wedding_rev.html" target="_blank">very long version, translated from medieval English, here</a>,
but I’m just going to summarize: King Arthur went out hunting one day
and became separated from his companions. He was captured by a knight
who intended to kill him, but decided to spare Arthur on the condition
that he return in precisely a year and give him the answer to the
question: what women want most? Arthur wasn’t supposed to tell anyone
about his encounter, but Gawain, his knight and dear companion,
recognized that something was going on, and got the story out of Arthur.
Gawain sensibly suggested that both he and Arthur use the intervening
months to talk to women all over the place and ask what they wanted.
Unfortunately, neither of them got a definitive answer: they got all
kinds of different ones, and Arthur, despairing of his life, with only a
month left in his timetable, went back to the woods where he’d been
captured.<br />
<br />
There he met the ugliest woman he had ever encountered in his life:<br />
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Her face was red and covered with snot, her mouth huge, and all her
teeth yellow, hanging over her lips. Her bleary eyes were greater than a
ball, and her cheeks were as broad as women’s hips. She had a hump on
her back, her neck was long and thick, and her hair clotted into a
heap. She was made like a barrel, with shoulders a yard wide and
hanging breasts that were large enough to be a horse’s load. No tongue
can tell of the foulness and ugliness of that lady.</div>
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(This sounds a bit like GRRM’s constant, overexaggerated descriptions of how ugly Brienne is, right?)<br />
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This woman introduced herself as Dame Ragnall, a virgin (because,
well, yeah!) and she told Arthur that she had the answer to his
question, which she would give him on the condition that Sir Gawain
marry her. Now Gawain, who is present in Arthurian legend long before
Lancelot comes swaggering in from Brittany, was considered the
handsomest and noblest of all Arthur’s knights, and Arthur felt terrible
about even asking Gawain to marry someone like Ragnall to save his own
life (I guess he would have felt better if she’d been beautiful *rolls
eyes*). But Gawain, being the noble knight he was, instantly said he’d
marry the Devil himself to save the life of his King, so Arthur returned
to Ragnall with Gawaine’s consent to the marriage, and Ragnall gives
King Arthur the answer to the question of what women want:<br />
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The one thing that we desire of men above all else is to have complete sovereignty, so that all is ours.</div>
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Arthur takes this answer (which Gawain does not know!) to the knight
who captured him, and the knight, revealing himself as Ragnall’s
brother, sort of gnashes his teeth and lets Arthur go.<br />
Ragnall arrives to marry Gawain, as he promised, and everyone who
sees her starts weeping for poor handsome honorable Gawain because he
will be yoked to someone so hideous. After the wedding feast, when they
are alone, Ragnall tells Gawain that it’s time to do his husbandly duty,
or at least give her a kiss, and Gawain says he’ll do what he swore and
that’s more than a kiss. He turns around to see a beautiful woman in
the place of the hideous creature he married, and Ragnall tells Gawain
something unexpected: she is under an enchantment, which means that she
can be beautiful <em>some</em> of the time. She tells
Gawaine he can choose for her to be beautiful during the day (so no one
will mock him for his wife’s hideousness) or for her to be beautiful at
night, when they are in bed together. Gawain tells her this:<br />
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I would like to choose what is best, but I have no idea what to say,
so I give you the choice; do as you like. Whatever you wish, I put it
in your hand. My body and goods, heart and every part of me is all your
own to buy and sell, I vow before God.</div>
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Because Gawain has given her what women desire most - sovereignty,
the right to make her OWN choice - the enchantment on Ragnall is lifted,
and she is beautiful both night and day.<br />
<br />
How does this relate to Jaime and Brienne? Well, first of all,
as I mentioned, there are the obvious parallels: Jaime is physically
beautiful and the companion of the King (albeit a companion who is distrusted and viewed with great suspicion); Brienne is
not quite as loathsome as the maiden in the story, but she’s by no means
a beauty. But the most important part of the equation for me is the
idea of a woman’s <em>sovereignty</em>. We know how
important that is to Brienne (she said she wouldn’t marry someone who
couldn’t best her in combat) but as far as we know, Jaime is one of only
three men who have ever respected her for her prowess and for her
Brienne-ness (the other two are her father, about whom we know very
little, but I assume since he let her train at arms/go off to join
Renly, he was ok with that; and the master-at-arms at Evenfall whom she
remembers quite kindly. Neither of them, of course, is a love interest!)<br />
<br />
Renly had Brienne join his Rainbow Guard knowing that she would be
willing to die for him just because he was kind to her, but we know that
he pitied her and there was a substantial amount of self-interest
there. Jaime, in contrast, <em>never </em>pities
Brienne. He mocks her mercilessly, he tries to kill her, he sees her
similarities to Tyrion - but he doesn’t pity Tyrion for being Tyrion any
more than he pities Brienne for being Brienne. He does feel pity and
empathy for her <em>situation</em> when she is about to be gang-raped
(recognizing that it will hurt her psychologically, “on the inside,
where it doesn’t show”) but that isn’t because she is ugly, or a
swordswench or whatever, it’s because she is a woman whose undoubted
strength and courage can’t help her in this particular situation (and
unlike the horrific Randyll Tarly, the merest shadow of the idea that
Brienne deserves punishment for transgressing the boundaries of her
gender <em>never ever</em> crosses Jaime’s mind, although he tries unsuccessfully to convince himself that he doesn’t care what happens
to her).<br />
<br />
Jaime has an enormous amount of respect for Brienne almost from the
beginning of his POV chapters (even in the very first one he thinks that
she has steel in her spine, and admires her courage - and her “almost”
gracefulness when she dives in the river.) One of the reasons he needles
her so mercilessly is because he <em>does</em> respect her, and he
subconsciously wants her respect, and he doesn’t <b>want</b> to want it, so he
keeps trying to make her do something that will let him say “she’s no
different from anyone else” and then he can stop wanting her good
opinion of him. But Brienne won’t deliver: he makes her angry, yes, and
they fight, but she won’t kill him and subsequently, she takes such tender care of a man she despises
that Jaime's perception of her is that she is "warm" and "gentler than Cersei." (I honestly cannot imagine Cersei cleaning up Jaime after he vomits and shits, can you?)<br />
<br />
We see Jaime again and again respecting Brienne’s “sovereignty”: He
doesn’t intervene in the bear pit until he’s established that she has a
tourney sword, because he trusts her abilities enough to know she could
kill the bear with a real sword; he gets between her and Loras to stop
Loras from killing her on the spot, and vouches for her honor, but he
doesn’t intervene in the ACTUAL conversation between Loras and Brienne
because he trusts that Brienne will convince Loras about Renly’s death
on her own; he gives her a quest and the tools to achieve it in the
belief that she is perfectly capable of doing so. In short, he doesn’t
treat her any differently because she is a woman (cf. contrast to
Randyll Tarly or the knights of Renly’s court.)<br />
<br />
Now the similarities to this story of Sir Gawain and Ragnall only go
so far: obviously Brienne isn’t going to turn into a raving beauty whose
bed Jaime can’t bring himself to leave :D But I think we also see a
transformation of Jaime’s perceptions of Brienne through his
descriptions of her eyes:<br />
"Pretty eyes, and calm" to "her big blue eyes were full of hurt" to <em>"she does have astonishing eyes." </em>
Have Brienne’s eyes changed that much to go from “pretty” to
“astonishing”? Hardly. Brienne’s one physically attractive attribute are
her lovely eyes, and it’s not surprising that this IS her one beauty
because of course, there is that whole cliche about the eyes being
windows to the soul. As Jaime comes to know Brienne better and better,
to know her character, her eyes become not just big and blue and pretty
but <em>astonishing</em> because *she* is astonishing and beautiful to him. When he gives Brienne Oathkeeper, the sword that he names both for her and for what he aspires to be, Jaime,
like Gawain, is saying to his own beautiful and loathly maiden Brienne:
“Whatever you wish, I put it in your hand. My body and goods, heart and
every part of me is all your own.”<br />
<br />
By the way, the loathly maiden of Gawain’s story marries him, and bears him a
son, and they are blissfully happy (for five years, and then she dies
which is sadly totally an ending I can see Martin pulling!)</div>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-41936196401813115362016-06-15T11:49:00.000-07:002016-06-15T11:49:02.953-07:00Beauty and the Beast - Part II - Rose Petals and MirrorsContinuing <a href="http://mummersdragon.blogspot.com/2016/06/beauty-and-beast-part-i-who-is-beauty.html">my discussion of George R. R. Martin's recasting of Beauty and the Beast with Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth,</a> this post is about roses and mirroring of arcs in their storylines.<br />
<br />
Roses play a huge part in the Beauty & the
Beast fairy tale (indeed Robin McKinley’s adaptation is called <em>Rose Daughter</em>):
in the fairy-tale, Beauty’s father, once rich, has lost all of his
wealth and he and his three daughters live in modest circumstances. He
receives word that one of his ships has come in to harbor, and, in the
hopes of recovering any of his wealth, goes to town to meet it; his two
older daughters ask for rich presents, but Beauty asks only for a <em><strong>rose</strong></em>
as a gift. Unfortunately, the ship is not carrying much wealth and/or
the wealth is seized or something, anyway, the father has no presents
for anyone and nearly dies in a snowstorm on his way home until he finds
refuge in a beautiful enchanted castle where he is richly fed and kept
warm through the night and which also has a rose-garden. On his way out,
Beauty’s father plucks the <em><strong>most beautiful rose</strong></em>
he can find to give to his daughter; the Beast, the owner of the
castle, who has so far kept out of sight, emerges, furious that Beauty’s
father has taken his most precious possession and says that Beauty’s
father must die. Dad argues that he didn’t know, and that he’s only
taking the rose for his youngest daughter and then tells the whole
sobstory to the Beast. The Beast agrees to let him go with gifts for his
daughters, including the rose (which, in some versions, is immortal,
never losing its petals.) Dad will return and face the Beast’s wrath
after he gives the gifts to his daughters.<br />
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Beauty finds out about her father’s deal and substitutes herself for
her father; the Beast is charmed by her, and she’s happy with him, but
eventually she becomes homesick and begs leave of the Beast to return to
her home for a visit. He agrees, but gives her either a mirror/the
magical rose and tells her that she has only to look in the mirror or
look at the rose and see whether it still has its petals to see how he
fares. Beauty’s sisters, jealous of what appears to be her happy life
with the Beast, convince her to stay with them longer than she had
promised the Beast and she does so out of love for them, until one day
she sees the Beast dying in the magic mirror he gave her (or, in some
versions, the magical rose begins to shrivel and die.) Beauty is
guilt-stricken and returns just in time to find the dying Beast, to whom
she swears her love (she either cries, kisses him or both, and he is
healed by her tears/kisses.)<br />
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Roses also play a huge role in the stories of Brienne and to a somewhat lesser degree, that of Sansa and Jon. (There's the crown of blue roses that Rhaegar gives Lyanna Stark at the tournament of Harrenhal, with such disastrous consequences; many people think Jon is the blue rose growing in a Wall of Ice that Dany sees in one of her visions in the House of the Undying in Qarth because it's very strongly hinted that Jon is the child of Rhaegar and Lyanna. At the Hand's Tournament in King's Landing, Sansa gets a rose from Loras Tyrell - the Knight of the Flowers - that is a sort of disguise for his real love for Renly Baratheon. The rose he gives to Sansa is a lie, but it comes just before she encounters Sandor Clegane - her own Beast, though he is a Hound, not a Lion - and hears the truth from him about his dreadful mutilation.)<br />
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Brienne also has a terrible, unhappy association with roses - when she was younger, Red Ronnet Connington was betrothed to her, and gave her a rose, telling her that this is all she will ever have of him. And the Roses of Highgarden - Margaery and Loras - take from her Renly, the man she first loves. In her dreams scattered through <i>A Feast for Crows, </i>Brienne dreams of that rose, but sometimes she dreams that it's Jaime who gives it to her (and in <i>that </i>version of her dream, she cuts of his hand); in part of the rose dream, she bites out her own tongue and spits out blood. This is not a happy thing for Brienne, but it's definitely a tie-in to the Beauty and the Beast symbolism.<br />
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Jaime (the Beast) who returns for Brienne (the Beauty) at Harrenhal, saving her from death after he sees her in the mirror of his dreams, being “almost a beauty/almost a knight” taking the role of two of the most significant people in his life, uniting the symbols of the two paths that Jaime could have chosen for himself, Cersei (beauty) and Arthur Dayne (knight). And then, in <i>A Dance with Dragons</i>, Brienne comes back for Jaime with what is almost certainly a lie, almost certainly at the behest of Lady Stoneheart who seeks Jaime's death is another mirror of the fairytale, where Beauty's sisters want the Beast to kill Beauty and/or die, so Beauty will no longer have the life they envy.<br />
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Brienne coming back to Jaime with a lie also to me is a mirror/change from the fairy-tale. (Beauty’s sisters want the Beast to kill her and/or die so Beauty will no longer have the life they envy.) We don't know what happened after Jaime left Pennytree with Brienne, whether she maintained the lie and betrayed Jaime, but up until now, Brienne mirror Jaime’s arc with hers - Jaime's word "sapphires" saved Brienne from being raped; Brienne's word "sword" saved Pod’s life and betrayed Jaime; Jaime left Brienne to her fate at Harrenhal; Brienne came back to Jaime to lead him to his fate; Jaime came back for Brienne and saved her life; Brienne will, I think, save Jaime's life with the truth, somehow. (And I plan a third part of this series with a discussion of truth and lies, centered around Jaime's misunderstood statement that what he seeks in a woman is innocence.)<br />
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I also want to mention a couple more things about roses, notoriously
symbolic of, well, vaginas. Like, here, have this poem by William Blake
called “The Sick Rose”:<br />
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O Rose thou art sick.<br />
The invisible worm, <br />
That flies in the night <br />
In the howling storm: <br />
Has found out thy bed <br />
Of crimson joy: <br />
And his dark secret love <br />
Does thy life destroy</blockquote>
“Bed of crimson joy”? “The dark secret love” of an “invisible worm”?
Somehow I do not think we are talking about horticulture here anymore! So … roses = deeply symbolic of female parts -<br />
And … Not to turn this into my own version of the Vagina Monologues, but the mouths? The <em>bloody</em>
mouths? Well, Freud thought mouths were symbolic of vaginas, and the
blood is a pretty obvious metaphor for both menses and loss of
virginity.<br />
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Accordingly, in ASOIAF, we get Brienne, who is a maid thanks to Jaime and
thanks to biting off Vargo Hoat’s ear - the “Goat”, a symbol of sexual
incontinence - and thanks to her prowess with a sword, who now dreams of
biting her tongue out, filling her mouth with blood, to stop herself
from saying the word “sword” so she will not condemn Jaime, the man who
gave her a blood-red sword, and whose whore she’s accused of being.
Could this collection of symbols, imagery and story progressions <b>be</b> any
more clear on what this is leading to? I think not!<br />
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Jaime (Beast/Beauty) is going
ensure that Brienne the Beauty/Beast is no longer the “Maid” of Tarth;
roses, swords, bloody mouths are all screaming this. I just don’t think
any of this implies he will go back to Cersei because I am 100%
convinced he is not the valonqar (Margaery, Sansa or Arya is) and the
strangling and tears are the Tears of Lys, also called the Strangler. If
Jaime didn’t come back for Cersei before the Walk of Shame, he is not
going to do so ever, ; that is their tragedy (she sent him away and
then Brienne called him back to <i>her.</i>) Jaime chose Brienne over Cersei when he went back to Harrenhal and missed Joffrey's wedding; Jaime burned Cersei's letter begging for his help, but went with Brienne from Pennytree based on her lie - I think there will be a third time when Jaime chooses Brienne over Cersei as well: he has given up his sexual relationship with Cersei; I think he will start one with Brienne before the story is over. In the end, Beauty and the Beast are not a platonic friendship; they start off as uneasy antagonists and end as lovers. I think this is what will happen with Brienne the Beauty and Jaime the Beast.<br />
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<br />Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-85070929571469672002016-06-13T12:04:00.000-07:002016-06-14T07:59:14.336-07:00Beauty and the Beast - Part I - Who is the Beauty and who the Beast?<div style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.00784314); border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-size: small;">It's probably no surprise that George R. R. Martin, who wrote for the TV show "Beauty and the Beast," really seems to like this fairy tale and has included two major Beauty and the Beast stories in </span><i style="color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard;">A Song of Ice and Fire</i><span style="color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard;">,</span><span style="color: black; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-size: small;"> those of Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister, and Sansa Stark and Sandor Clegane. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;">I've just read the chapter in </span><i style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;">A Clash of Kings</i><span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;"> where Catelyn visits Jaime in the dungeons of Riverrun (one of my favorite chapters in that novel and in the series, because it’s so packed full of interesting things and quotable lines. “What’s a brother’s life when honor’s at stake?” “So many vows, they make you swear and swear” “There are no men like me.”) and it’s very, very striking to me that GRRM puts all this Beauty and the Beast stuff for Brienne and Jaime into Catelyn’s head, assigning her the role that Beauty's father plays in the original fairytale, of introducing Beauty and the Beast to one another. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;">Catelyn (and the readers) meet Brienne at Renly’s tournament at Bitterbridge; before Brienne ever speaks a line of dialogue, we (and Catelyn) are informed that this woman is mockingly called “Brienne the Beauty” (in the same way that a giant might be called “Tiny.”)</span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444;">"That's Brienne of Tarth, daughter to Lord Welwyn the Evenstar."</span></blockquote>
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<i>"Daughter?" </i>Catelyn was horrified </blockquote>
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"Brienne <b>the Beauty</b>, they name her ... though not to her face, lest they be called upon to defend those words with their bodies.</blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Catelyn also notices Brienne’s eyes, foreshadowing Jaime’s noticing them. And this is imo, very, very deliberate, because of that unattributable but very popular quote about eyes being the windows to your soul.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Beauty</b>, they called her ... mocking... Brienne's eyes were large and very blue, a young girl's eyes, trusting and guileless, but the rest ... </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Catelyn, who sees elements of Sansa and Arya in Brienne, is wonderfully motherly and kind to this girl whose inability to fit into the norms of society is so manifest. She is with Brienne when Renly - the first man Brienne has loved - is murdered by the sorcery of a devotee of Rh’llor, and dissuades Brienne from fruitlessly seeking revenge against Stannis that will only lead to Brienne’s own death. Brienne, whose habit is to recklessly pledge her life and allegiance to anyone who’s kind to her, says her vows as Catelyn’s sworn sword, putting her on the tragic path to meet Catelyn’s horrifying revenant, Lady Stoneheart, who was raised from the dead by a devotee of Rh’llor, and, who in her quest for vengeance, makes Brienne swear a heartbreaking oath to kill the man she loves, in order to save the life of an innocent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At Riverrun, Catelyn, who comforted Brienne in her grief for Renly, tells Brienne about Bran’s and Rickon’s supposed deaths - in fact, aside from the Riverrun Maester who gave Catelyn the message, Brienne is the only person in Riverrun who knows about Bran and Rickon at this point, just as Catelyn was the only witness besides Brienne to the shadow that killed Renly. Again, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">this is important</i>. There are reasons why Catelyn, Brienne and Jaime form these alliances and connections and I really think Catelyn’s role in pushing Brienne and Jaime together cannot be understated. The dinner where Catelyn reveals this tragedy to Brienne is actually quite weird because Catelyn has this strange, dissociative conversation with Brienne, leaping from topic to topic, almost talking to herself. At one point, the reader is led to think that Catelyn will seek revenge on Jaime right then and there, since he is the only enemy who is within her power. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And then we get to the dungeon, and (sadly) the only scene Catelyn and Jaime share. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jaime Lannister had been allowed no razor since the night he was taken in the Whispering Wood, and a shaggy beard covered his face, once so like the queen's. Glinting gold in the lamplight, the whiskers made him look like <i style="font-weight: bold;">some great yellow beast, magnificent even in chains</i>. His unwashed hair fell to his shoulders in ropes and tangles, the clothes were rotting on his body, his face was pale and wasted ... and even so, <i style="font-weight: bold;">the power and the beauty</i> of the man were apparent.</span></blockquote>
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<a name='more'></a>The language here is very deliberate - Jaime's house sigil is a lion, and Catelyn thinks of him here in leonine terms - golden whiskers/great yellow beat (significantly, in the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, the Beast is often portrayed with leonine features.) Catelyn, <span style="font-family: inherit;">who is devastated by grief for her murdered children, who is desperate to save the ones who remain to her, who has decided to do something that she knows will estrange her from Robb and Edmure, still takes time out to notice Jaime Lannister’s physical presence. In the same paragraph, she calls him </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">a beast </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">and </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">beautiful. (</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Jaime must be insanely charismatic and gorgeous, because he apparently hasn’t bathed or changed his clothes or had room to stretch his limbs out thanks to the chains in something like 3 months* but Catelyn, who has every reason in the world to absolutely loathe Jaime, still perceives him as possessing power and beauty and magnificence.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s a whoooole lot more to this scene, of course, with Jaime’s talking about vows and how it’s impossible to reconcile them (which will be something that Brienne - and Jon, and Robb who’s off at the Crag marrying Jeyne Westering at the time this scene is taking place - all have to come to terms with) and since Brienne apparently is well aware of Jaime’s guilt regarding Bran and his relationship with Cersei, I have to believe she overhears the entire conversation, including the horrifying tale - that has apparently haunted Jaime all these years, even if he shrugs it off as “the Starks meant nothing to me - of how Brandon and Rickard Stark really died. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This amazing conversation ends with Catelyn calling to Brienne for her sword, the sword Brienne swore to Catelyn earlier, which foreshadows another sword that will be Brienne’s death warrant when Catelyn’s zombie self finds it in Brienne’s possession. (That sword, named Oathkeeper for Brienne by Jaime, only comes into Brienne’s possession because Catelyn sends Brienne on this journey with Jaime; and we learn later that Catelyn also made Jaime swear a whole bunch of oaths at Brienne’s sword point, oaths that he quite unexpectedly decides to keep because of what befalls him in Brienne’s company, i.e. losing his sword hand, and with it, his identity as only the Kingslayer.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In any case, Catelyn, whose introduction to Brienne includes the mocking designation of Brienne as “the beauty”, Catelyn, who considers Jaime as both “beauty and (vile) beast,” is also the person who sets up this Beauty and the Beast storyline for Brienne and Jaime, and who puts them in each other’s paths. And later, as an inverse, almost, of living Catelyn, Lady Stoneheart somehow (we don’t quite know exactly how or why) reunites Brienne and Jaime after they both think they have parted ways for ever. It may all end in blood, but Catelyn keeps facilitating this narrative, which is why I jokingly call her a shipper. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In retrospect, it seems blindingly obvious that we are being served a big Beauty and the Beast storyline, and I think people who have read the books and contest that this is a love story maybe just need to go back and read a little more carefully. What makes <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">this </i>Beauty and the Beast so different and so compelling to me, far more so than the other versions even that Martin is telling, is that Brienne and Jaime aren’t just a gender-flipped version (though there is definitely part of that) - it’s that in the narrative, they are both, equally Beauty <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">and </span>Beast. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Brienne is mockingly called the Beauty, because physically, well, she’s kind of a Beast (Jaime thinks of her as a “cow” when they’re first traveling together, and there is pointed emphasis on her physical unattractiveness, her “unnatural” abilities for a woman. Her only beauty, it’s repeatedly emphasized, is a pair of gorgeous blue eyes. Which, again, see above: windows on the soul.) So she’s physically a beast (both in terms of attractiveness and in the way that we sometimes call someone who’s physically strong and has amazing stamina “a beast”) but morally a beauty. And like the Beast in the fairytale, Brienne also longs for love, to the point where if people are even vaguely not horrible to her, she pledges them her life and sword.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And Jaime - well, Catelyn thinks of him as a magnificent beast and as the most beautiful man she’s ever seen; Jon thinks he looks like a King; Bran thinks he looks like a knight out of stories; his physical attractiveness is emphasized over and over and over again, but at the same time, Jaime is a monster, the Kingslayer, the man who threw a seven-year-old child off a tower to his death, who flouts every rule of morality with his ongoing affair with Cersei. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Like the Beast in the fairy-tale, both Brienne and Jaime have built fortresses to protect themselves from the world. Jaime built a wall around his horror at Aerys’s actions and his disillusionment that the fabled knights of the Kingsguard, all paragons of honor, did nothing to interfere with those actions; Brienne built a wall of suspicion and mistrust around herself because of how everyone she has ever met has mocked and belittled her for her appearance and for her nonconformity. Brienne is there when the walls Jaime has built around himself crumble, when he loses the sword hand that did so much evil, and she is there when he tells her about the Kingslaying and why he did this thing for which he is universally reviled. Jaime recognizes that Brienne will be irrevocably hurt (”on the inside”) if she is raped because she doesn’t have those walls, and, in his first selfless action since he killed Aerys, Jaime acts to spare her that horror.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Also like the fairy tale Beast, both Brienne and Jaime are fundamentally lonely people: Brienne has no siblings and Catelyn seems like the first actual <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">friend </i>she’s ever had; Jaime has Tyrion and Cersei but one of the things about his sexual relationship with Cersei is that they must be secretive about it - which precludes any kind of really deep friendship with anyone else. Tyrion remembers Jaime being really good at leading men, and we do get a little mention of Addam Marbrand’s childhood friendship with Jaime, but neither of these are truly equal relationships. That’s in part because all of Jaime’s relationships other than that with Tyrion are colored both by Jaime’s Kingslayer rep and by the need to preserve the secrecy of his relationship with Cersei. (It must have been awkward being on the Kingsguard with Barristan silently (or not so silently) despising Jaime for years, eh?) Strikingly, <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Brienne</span> is the only person Jaime confides in about why he slew Aerys (and because he’s out of the habit of confiding in anyone, he does later regret that moment of what he considers “weakness” later on.) He tells Brienne because he trusts her, because - for the first time in his adult life (Arthur Dayne died when Jaime was still a boy) - he has met someone who actually lives up to those ideals that he once shared, and who makes Jaime realize that it’s still possible to live morally in an immoral world. (And oh dear, the fallout of Brienne’s betrayal of Jaime to Stoneheart, if that is indeed what happens, will be immense, I think.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And it’s this, this Beauty and Beastliness of BOTH parties, this equality in their perceptions of each other, where each of them has been the knight and each has been the damsel, and they change up and switch roles almost unconsciously, that makes THIS story so compelling to me. It’s wonderful, and wonderfully told, and it is also, as someone pointed out (I’m sorry I can’t remember exactly where I read this!) the ONLY “falling in love” story in these books where we get both parties’ points of view. We <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">know </i>what they think and feel about each other, and it’s beautiful - and also why I have to believe that Jaime hasn’t died offscreen at Stoneheart’s hands, or that Brienne will immediately kill him in chapter 3 of <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Winds of Winter </i>or whatever. There has just been way too much build-up of their beauty and beastliness and meaningfulness to each other’s storylines. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://mummersdragon.blogspot.com/2016/06/beauty-and-beast-part-ii-rose-petals.html">Part II - where I talk about roses and falsehood - is here.</a></span></div>
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<i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">*<a href="http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?/topic/31411-global-timeline/" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(68, 68, 68, 0) 50%, rgba(68, 68, 68, 0.247059) 0px); background-position: 0px 1.15em; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 1em 2px; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; cursor: pointer; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0.15em; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Based on this timeline,</a> Catelyn arrives at Bitterbridge on August 4, Renly dies on August 29, Catelyn arrives back at Riverrun on October 4, so about 6 weeks journey from Bitterbridge, and she frees Jaime on October 29. This means that the failed rescue attempt of Jaime had to take place sometime between July 14, when Tyrion dispatches Cleos back to RR with the fake Lannister soldiers, and Cat’s return on August 4.. </span></i></div>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-10802518569950907442016-06-10T11:20:00.000-07:002016-06-10T11:20:17.139-07:00Of Swords and MenAfter Jaime loses his right hand, he wonders "is that all I was? A swordhand?"; his maiming presents him with a severe identity crisis: he has always thought of himself as "the Warrior" and nothing more, and now suddenly, he cannot physically be that person any more. His initial reaction to the obliteration of his identity is to will himself to die, until Brienne asks if he is so craven that he's willing to give up, implying that she sees that there is more to him than his notorious reputation, that there is a man there who exists apart from his swordhand.<br />
<br />
After Jaime and Brienne return to King's Landing, Tywin Lannister urges his son to break his Kingsguard vows, and even gives him one of the two Valyrian steel swords reforged from Ned Stark's great sword Ice. Jaime, who once would have given his right hand for such a sword, has no use for it now, and sees it as a bribe from Tywin - so instead, he turns around and gives the sword, which he names Oathkeeper, to Brienne of Tarth. Along with the sword, he gives Brienne a quest to find Sansa Stark, and in doing so, to find Jaime's own lost honor. That last part of the quest, Jaime's honor, which becomes the foremost thing in Brienne's mind in <i>A Feast for Crows</i>, is a sign that in some important ways, Jaime, in many important ways, actually<i> is</i> the sword he gives to Brienne.<br />
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First of all, the conflation of men and their swords (their literal
ones, not as metaphors for their penises!) happens quite a lot in the series: there are
“sworn swords” aplenty, and “sellswords” where the identity of the
(almost always) men is subsumed in their weapons (in contrast, we never
hear of “sworn bows” or “sellbows” or “sworn axes” and “sellaxes”,
right?). Then there is the Kingsguard, the institution which so shapes
Jaime: The Kingsguard lose their family names and emblems, lose the
ability to continue their names (when they swear to hold no lands, take
no wives, father no children), when they become the King’s Sworn Swords,
and they are called the <i><b>"White Swords"</b></i> who
live in the White Sword Tower. And then there’s Arthur Dayne, the idol
of Jaime’s youth, was nicknamed “the Sword of the Morning.” So
men=swords quite a lot!<br />
<br />
And what does that mean for Jaime? Jaime was a sworn sword who broke
his vows, a White Sword who used a golden sword to kill his King. Like
Ned Stark’s sword Ice, Jaime is broken and remade twice, tempered twice
by fire. The first time the fires are metaphorical: Jaime, the Young
Lion, Aerys’s sworn sword, became the Kingslayer because of Aerys’s
wildfire. The second time they are literal: Jaime’s sword hand is gone,
and flames cauterize his wound (not to mention the boiling wine with
which Qyburn cleanses the corruption from it). Both fire AND water are necessary to forge a sword, and so Jaime’s
confession to Brienne comes when they are both immersed in water, as
Jaime burns with fever. How’s that for symbolism?<br />
<br />
Like Jaime, Ned Stark’s sword ice is broken down, and remade, and it comes out of the forge completely different, made into <i>two</i> swords,
Widow’s Wail and Oathkeeper, neither of which resembles the original
Ice’s smoky grey. Instead, these new swords are, oddly enough, Targaryen
colors: blood red and black (“waves of night and blood upon some steely
shore”). Tobho Mott tells Tywin and Tyrion that the swords chose their
own colors, no matter how hard he tried to make them Lannister crimson,
part of the magic of Valyrian steel (which can also kill White Walkers,
let’s not forget!)<br />
<br />
Then there are the names and appearances of the swords. Jaime/Brienne fans talk about Oathkeeper <i>a lot</i> but
Widow’s Wail is also important, I think. It is a smaller sword, made
for Joffrey, who is a boy. Both Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail have lion’s
head pommels, but Widow’s Wail, Tywin Lannister’s wedding gift to
Joffrey, screams out LANNISTER. Its hilt is more ornate than that of
Oathkeeper, “the arms of its cross-guard done as lions’ paws with ruby
claws unsheathed” and Joffrey uses it to destroy learning/reason,
represented by the book that Tyrion gives him as his wedding gift.<br />
Moreover, Widow’s Wail has one of the really standard types of sword
names. Almost all the named Valyrian steel swords we know either reflect
something about the house they belong to: the Starks had Ice, of
course, because “Winter is Coming”; the Lannisters had (now lost)
Brightroar; the Mormonts Longclaw; the Targaryens had (lost) Blackfyre.
The other naming convention seems to be a sort of boastful commentary on
the sword’s function: the Tarlys have Heartsbane; Visenya Targaryen
wielded Dark Sister, and we also know of Red Rain, Nightfall and Lady
Forlorn. Widow’s Wail, of course fits in with this second group
perfectly. Significantly, this sword which is a visible symbol of
Lannister power and pride, is given successively to the tangible proof
of Jaime’s love for Cersei, his two sons by her, who are, though Tywin
doesn’t know it, purely Lannisters: Joffrey, who is utterly unworthy of
the sword and who uses it once for an utterly unworthy purpose, and
Tommen, who is far too young to wield it.<br />
<br />
And then there is Oathkeeper, which, along with one other sword
(Arthur Dayne’s Dawn, which may or may not be Valyrian steel and which
has a distinctive color like Oathkeeper - “pale as milkglass”) has a
name that is neither a threat (like Heartsbane or Widow’s Wail) nor a
link to a specific House. And look who names it: Jaime Lannister, the
most notorious oathbreaker in Westeros. Now, many clever people have
argued that he names the sword after Brienne, and though I like the idea
of it, I … think it is actually named as an act of aspiration <i><b>for himself</b></i>.<br />
<br />
Oathkeeper is a gift from Tywin Lannister to Jaime, a promise of
greater gifts to come if Jaime will do what Tywin wants, and wiggle out
of his Kingsugard oaths, resume his rightful position as the head of
House Lannister, and be “the man you were always meant to be.” But Jaime
rejects all of what Tywin offers him: he names this amazing sword <i><b>Oathkeeper</b></i>,
a rebuke to his father who would have him break his oaths (AGAIN!) and
he rejects everything Tywin offers him, his “place” as the head of House
Lannister, his inheritance of Casterly Rock. In turn, Tywin tells Jaime "you are not my son." Those are cruel words, but they also free Jaime from the burden of being the Kingslayer, Cersei's lover, Tywin's son, the expectations of his family. That freedom will not fully come to fruition until <i>A Dance with Dragons</i>, when Jaime abandons the Lannister army he is leading back to King's Landing and disappears with Brienne to who knows where for who knows what purpose, although we may surmise that it may be to face Lady Stoneheart's judgment for <i>being </i>a Lannister (Lady Stoneheart, who is busy hanging anyone who's a Frey or a Lannister, or who fought for them, using the principle of collective guilt by association, even though obviously we know that not every Frey or Lannister foot soldier planned the Red Wedding.)<br />
<br />
So these two swords, Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail, are, for me, the
two parts of Jaime, who is broken and changed: Widow’s Wail is the Jaime
that was, the boastful warrior who made made many widows wail, the
sword that is practically a giant blinking neon sign of Lannisterness,
given to Jaime’s children by Cersei, which is used to destroy something
fragile and precious (a rare book) as Jaime destroyed Bran’s life;
Oathkeeper is the Jaime that <i>he now wants to be</i>, from the name
to the fact that he gives it away to the only true knight he knows to
the fact that he wants it to be used for something that is <b><i>benign</i></b> (as benign as a sword can be), which is to protect Ned Stark’s daughter with Ned Stark’s steel.<br />
<br />
And Oathkeeper, wielded by Brienne, ties into the idea that the sword representing Justice: Ice was last used to cut off the head of the
innocent Ned Stark (and before that seen when Ned was executing a
Night’s Watch deserter whose crime was to be terrified of nightmares
come to life. I know, I know, rules are rules, blahblahblah, but
Gared-in-the-books/Will-on-the-show hadn’t committed any actual crime
and in fact had delivered a warning that no one cared to hear).
Oathkeeper, in contrast, is used by Brienne to deliver justice to the
remnants of the Brave Companions for their many crimes, and to protect
and defend the children at the Inn of the Crossroads.<br />
<br />
When
Jaime tells Brienne that Sansa Stark is his last chance for honor and
gives Brienne the sword that is his best self, the self he wants to be
(Goldenhand the Just, instead of the Kingslayer) and names it Oathkeeper, which Brienne uses for justice, not to kill the innocent, he is, in a way, delivering himself to Brienne's safekeeping.Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-67077233677440018472016-06-08T08:26:00.000-07:002016-06-08T08:26:00.464-07:00Beauty, Love, and Honor - Jaime, Brienne and Cersei<br />
<br />
<header class="post-header"> In <i>A Song of Ice and Fire</i>, George R. R. Martin frequently gives us twisted versions of different tropes: tropes that are common in fantasy (the hidden "commoner" who turns out to be a prince in reality which seems to be where Jon's story is headed), in romance (he definitely loves Beauty and the Beast because he's telling it at least twice in ASOIAF), as well as older tropes of courtly love and chivalry. And nowhere are those tropes, and their subversions, more apparent than in the story of Jaime Lannister, the soiled knight, who looks like a "king" according to Jon Snow, who is the most beautiful and most vile man Catelyn Stark has ever known, and whose white cloak "becomes him" as Brienne of Tarth says. In keeping with Jaime's complex inner life and storyline, his romantic relationships are equally complex and equally subvert our expectations.<br />
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Jaime is part of two relationships
that have their genesis in romantic tropes: with Cersei he subverts a
tale that we that we know from Guinevere and Lancelot, from Tristan and
Isolde, etc., because she is his <em>twin sister</em>. (Take that
element out and you have the classic tale of a queen married to an King
for political reasons who loves the gallant young knight who fights for
her husband. In this case, our sympathies are usually with the queen and
her knight. Westeros even apparently has its own version of this mythos
with Aemon the Dragonknight who joined the Kingsguard to be with his sister, the Queen, exactly what Jaime does (although Naerys was married to her own and Aemon's brother, so that was an extra layer of incest added in.) Because Cersei is Jaime’s twin sister and
because their bond is not treated with this mythical reverence that we
give to Tristan and Isolde and their ilk, we see the ugliness of what
they do to hide their love and eventually we also see how the bonds that
hold them together don’t survive their physical separation. (And unlike
Wagner’s Siegmund and Sieglinde, who were twins, their children are not
Siegfrieds born to save the world, but a Joffrey born to destroy it, and Myrcella and Tommen, who, to be fair, are decent, good children, but certainly not mythically prophesied saviors.)<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span">If Martin had never
shown Brienne to be totally in love with Jaime (and deeply attracted to
him physically as we learn from her POV in <i>A Feast for Crows</i>, where she remembers Jaime's naked body in the baths at Harrenhal) I would have been fine with their friendship-love being
the endgame. But she <em>is</em> in love with him and although I can’t say in the books whether he’s <strong>in love</strong> with
her yet, there is certainly an incredibly
deep bond of love from him to her. </span><br />
<br /><span class="Apple-style-span">If we don’t listen Jaime’s inner
monologue to convince us (and more importantly himself) that he’s just
paying his debts like a good Lannister, and focus on his actions, he does things that would be considered extremely romantic in any context: he tells a lie to Vargo Hoat about sapphires to save Brienne
from immediate rape; then (in the books) after his hand is cut off and
Brienne has talked him out of his death wish, he risks an incredible
amount of pain to save her from another rape attempt by Hoat’s vile
henchmen (they kick his infected stump again and again after he shouts
“sapphires” and he faints from the pain); he bares his soul to her,
telling her something he has told <em><strong>no one</strong></em> else
ever, not his father, not his beloved Cersei, not even his brother
Tyrion to whom he’s told many other things; and finally, he jumps into
the bear pit for her with nothing but his body to defend her from death
(a more thoughtful man might have thrown her a sword, but … on some
level, I think Jaime knew a) the only way Steelshanks Walton was going
to intervene was if <em><strong>Jaime’s </strong></em>life was in danger
and b) he’s clearly either going to save Brienne or die beside her. I
don’t know about you, but however much I like my friends, the only
people for whom I’d play human shield in the presence of an angry bear
are my husband and my son. (And even my husband is iffy :P))</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></header><br />
<div class="text post-content">
<span class="Apple-style-span"></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span">With Brienne and Jaime, Martin comes
back to a romantic theme he uses with quite often in the series (most
notably with regards to Sansa): that of Beauty and the Beast, only
everything is tangled up so both Jaime (physically) and Brienne
(morally) are beauty and reversed, they are both the beast. But I think romantic elements of the bond between
Brienne and Jaime are very much intended by Martin: Beauty and the Beast
don’t become best friends; they do learn to know each other as friends
but they fall in love and they end as lovers. (The story of Cupid and
Psyche, which has elements of Beauty and the Beast, is an allegory for
the soul’s search for love, and you can tell me until you’re blue in the
face that friendship is also a kind of love - and I agree! - but Psyche
is actually sleeping with Cupid and is even pregnant when her family
convinces her she’s married to a monster so she goes to kill him. So you
know, it <em>is</em> about sexytimes too!)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><br />I
think Brienne having a physical attraction to Jaime and then being
“friend-zoned” by him would be a kind of redundant repetition of her arc
with Renly, and given how much Martin has emphasized her physical
ugliness (complete with giving her a hideous facial scar) and how he
seems very determined to show that beauty is skin-deep etc. (so Dany’s
attraction to the handsome Daario is kind of laughable, but Gilly’s
attraction to Sam is sweet and wholesome), I think it would be the
culmination of that to have (beautiful) Jaime fall in love with
(beastly) Brienne after he has become more beautiful (on the inside)
thanks in part to her inner beauty.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span">I also keep coming back to Jaime’s
dream: In a dream in which he is rejected by Cersei, his ideal of love,
and accused by Ser Arthur Dayne, his ideal of Knighthood, the person who
stands by him and defends him (as they are both naked) is Brienne, and this is how he sees her:
“in this light she could be a beauty, in this light she could be a
knight.” If we are meant to infer that Jaime and Brienne will be nothing more than friends, then there is no reason for this dream to note that Brienne is <strong>both</strong> a woman AND a knight or to juxtapose her with both Cersei AND Arthur Dayne. If we were simply to infer that Brienne is a someone Jaime considers a friend, then we might have gotten at most his juxtaposition of Brienne and Arthur Dayne, the example of the true meaning of chivalry that Jaime returns to over and over again. Instead, we also have Cersei, the only woman Jaime has loved <i>until now </i>and had a sexual relationship with, turn away from Jaime just before Brienne appears in Jaime's dream naked and "with more of woman's shape."<br /><br />I’ve
also been thinking about honor and how in patriarchal societies like
most of Westeros (exceptions for Dorne and the Wildlings) a woman’s
honor involved her sexual activities (a woman “dishonors” her husband by
having an affair; a woman is “dishonored” by rape) and her sexual
choices reflect on the man who “owns” her (husband, brother, father).
Whereas a knight’s honor is separate from sexuality (mostly, unless he’s
in the Night’s Watch or Kingsguard) and concerned with protecting the
weak, defending the realm etc.<br /><br />Brienne is one of the few (maybe
the only?) characters who has both kinds of honor because she is a woman
as well as a knight and both kinds of honor tie her to Jaime, who is
one of the few people who readily accepts the dual nature of Brienne’s
honor. In contrast to the cruel knights in Renly’s camp who bet on who
will deflower her (and whose focus is on her “honor” as a woman) and to
Randyll Tarly who literally tells her that if she’s raped it’s her own
fault for not adhering to her prescribed role, Jaime saves Brienne from
“dishonor” as a woman by his lie regarding sapphires because he
understands how that will scar her on the inside. Later, he vouchsafes
her honor as a knight to Loras and then goes even further in giving his
own “last chance for honor” into her keeping. It’s such a gorgeous
progression and it tells me that as much as Brienne knows Jaime’s sins
and loves him anyway, he knows <strong>who</strong> she is on this level
that no one else does. And I think a romance between them wouldn’t
cheapen that knowledge and love but enhance it.</span></div>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-54091712996175680002016-06-06T08:10:00.000-07:002016-06-06T08:10:22.384-07:00Jaime Lannister and redemption arcs<br />
<br />
<header class="post-header"> </header><br />
<div class="text post-content">
Redemption is a very loaded word, because of its meaning for
Christianity, where Christ the Redeemer is considered to have paid for
the souls of sinners with his own life, there by redeeming - buying them
back - from sin. Whereas when I talk about redemption, I mean the
secondary meaning of the word, which is “the act of making something
better” and by this definition I think Jaime IS on a redemption arc.<br />
<br />
For me, redemption is a journey for which there is no endpoint.
There’s no balance sheet, no moment in a redemption arc (or shouldn’t
be) when someone says “OK, you did this and this and this and now you’ve
paid for these bad things you did and you’re redeemed.” There’s never
going to be a moment where we can say “Oh, Jaime did this, and that
makes up for Bran”; if that were the case, then he already build up
500,000 souls worth of good karma when he saved King’s Landing and he
can still kill 499,999 people and be on the plus side of the ledger,
which is obviously a ridiculous assertion. It never works that way. (I
prefer what the Talmud says: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered
as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is
considered as if he saved an entire world.” In other words, each action -
good or bad - is complete in itself, and is not a tick in a cosmic
ledger of good and evil.)<br />
<br />
Redemption is also not about restitution; Jaime can’t restore
Bran’s legs any more than he can grow a new hand for himself. He can
never “make it up” to the person he actually injured. He can only do his
best to do right by others he encounters, NOT to do those evil things
for love again. For me, redemption lies less in adding up the measure of
“good things vs. bad things” ("what’s one boy against a kingdom?" as
Stannis asked when the answer is always going to be "one boy's life" as Davos answered) and more in recognizing what you have done that is evil,
changing what you can change and trying to be a good person even if no
one around you believes you can be. It’s holding your ground even when
your sister mocks you and your father disowns you and doing what you
KNOW is right. And so for me, by that measure, Jaime IS on a redemption
arc.</div>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-78910975549407738372016-06-05T14:22:00.001-07:002016-06-05T14:22:42.048-07:00A Game of Thrones - Chapter 10 - Jon II"It should have been you."<br />
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Catelyn Stark's words to Jon Snow in this chapter guaranteed that so many fans of the series would hate her forever for being mean to Jon. I don't share that view, by the way - I think Catelyn's words are cruel and unjustifiable, but don't signify that she's either a bad person. Martin is showing us that someone can be an essentially good person, who does or says one or two terrible things, which don't change the fact that they are not terrible people (he will do the inverse as well, making some people who may strike as terrible have done noble things as well.) And having read two chapters of Catelyn's POV already, we know that she doesn't sit around and think about how much she hates Jon all the time when she's not maddened by grief and guilt (we'll learn later in this chapter she thinks it was her fervent desire to have Ned leave Bran with her in Winterfell that resulted in her prayers being answered in the cruelest possible way). It's unfair and cruel, I don't deny, but I must say I find fandom's reaction of placing Catelyn on a par with Gregor Clegane on the scale of evil people we hate is disturbing to me. I can like and sympathize with both Jon and Catelyn, and I do.<br />
<br />
Onto the chapter:<br />
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Jon is about to head up to the Wall. Having read the rest of the series, there is an enormous poignancy in the goodbyes he's making to the people of Winterfell.<br />
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We find out that Jon has stayed away from Bran's sickroom because Catelyn hasn't left it once, and he is uncomfortable with Catelyn (a situation that understandable from Catelyn's perspective and completely not Jon's fault, so yet again, we get two good people with incompatible goals and aims. It's very sad!)<br />
<br />
Catelyn tells Jon to leave, and even asks if she must call the guards, but Jon who thinks that he'll soon be a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch and "face worse dangers than Catelyn Tully Stark" insists that Bran is his brother and she can't stop him from seeing Bran.<br />
<br />
Jon says goodbye to Bran, and Catelyn surprisingly tells Jon that she prayed "seven times to the seven faces of god that Ned would change his mind and leave him here with me. Sometimes prayers are answered." Poor Jon, the awkward teenaged boy who has never had a good relationship with this woman, doesn't know what to say to her. He tries to say it's not Catelyn's fault, and she turns on him, saying "I need none of your absolution."<br />
<br />
This is Jon's cue to leave, but he turns back one more time when Catelyn addresses him as Jon.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He should have kept going, but she had never called him by his name before. He turned to find her looking at his face, as if she were seeing it for the first time. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Yes?" he said. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It should have been you," she told him. Then she turned back to Bran and began to weep, her whole body shaking with the sobs. Jon had never seen her cry before. </blockquote>
This is a horrible thing to say, but I think it is coming from Catelyn's immense grief, her guilt that she has somehow brought about Bran's accident as an "answer to her prayers" (as far as she or anyone else knows at the point, he just fell off the tower when he was climbing - it's not until the dagger-wielding assassin arrives that anyone thinks his fall might have not been an accident) and her feelings that if she had not insisted on Jon's leaving Winterfell, maybe Ned would have let her keep Bran, so she wouldn't have prayed and then had her prayers answered. It's all super-tangled up and awful, and results in so much grief for so many people, that it's quite heartbreaking all around.<br />
<br />
When Jon emerges from this devastating encounter (it's not every day - yet - that Jon has had people wish him dead to his face), he meets Robb, whose feelings he spares when Robb asks how Catelyn was with Jon. "She was ... very kind," Jon tells him. Aww, Jon is a good kid, really! (Also, a bit of dramatic irony here, with Robb telling Jon that Bran won't die, and Jon replying that "you Starks are hard to kill" to the one Stark who proves rather easy to kill, the brother Jon will never see again in life. *excuse me while I go fetch a tissue*)<br />
<br />
Then Jon goes to see Arya, the sibling to him he's closest. Arya is packing with Nymeria's dubious help, and this is just a lovely little scene that's balm to both Jon's wounded soul and to those of the readers. Jon has brought Arya the sword he had Mikken make for her (RIP Mikken), specially designed to Arya can wield it.<br />
<br />
Jon gives her her first lesson: "Stick them with the pointy end." (which he will remember, tragically, as he's being stabbed at the end of <i>A Dance with Dragons</i>, stabbed because his love for Arya and his need to rescue her from Ramsay Bolton, overrides his dedication to the Night's Watch.) They both laugh and say "Whatever you do, don't tell Sansa" in unison - a little subtle indication of the way the relationships between Jon and his two half-sisters work.<br />
<br />
Arya wishes that Jon could go with her to King's Landing, and Jon says that "different roads sometimes lead to the same castle." I think this is something important to remember as I believe that all the Stark siblings (save Robb) will be important in the battle against the Others, in their different ways.<br />
<br />
Jon tells Arya that all the best swords have names, and teases her with the name he's given this one. They say "Needle" together, showing how much alike they think. And then it's goodbye.<br />
<br />
"The memory of her laughter warmed him on the long ride north."<br />
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Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-57225241816943818042016-04-25T11:37:00.000-07:002016-04-25T11:54:17.100-07:00A Game of Thrones - Tyrion I (Chapter 9)<div style="line-height: normal;">
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Dany and Tyrion are the only two non-Stark POVs in the first book, which is quite interesting. Tyrion's first POV comes right after we see Jaime throw Bran out the window, though it's some time later (I'm not actually sure how much later, whether we're talking days or weeks here.) Mostly this chapter is all about how Tyrion is the "good" Lannister, quite different from his siblings. We already got a tiny glimpse of this in his conversation with Jon, but now we get to see what makes him tick. Warning: This will be VERY LONG because I really like the Lannister family dynamics and because Tyrion and Jaime (Handless and Noseless!) are endlessly fascinating to me! So … diving in:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tyrion has stayed up all night, reading in the Winterfell library, which basically guarantees that I (and every other reader who's started a book series that's now over 5000 pages long!) will have a good initial impression of him. He's reading a book about the changing of the seasons, which is a rather interesting choice, but maybe he got interested in the Starks' house words "winter is coming." Even in the library, he can hear Bran's as-yet-unnamed direwolf howling.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tyrion tells the Septon in charge of the library to take care of the rare volumes (I'm sure he'd be quite devastated to learn about the fire that will soon engulf these rare books.) I think it's interesting that the librarian is a septon (surely brought by Catelyn? She mentions that Ned built the sept for her) and not Maester Luwin. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As Tyrion descends the library tower, he overhears Sandor Clegane say that "the boy is a long time dying. I wish he would be quicker about it." It's the same song Jaime will sing a little bit later; I realize that Martin is starting to parallel the Hound and Jaime already (although Jaime has darker reasons than just not liking the wolf howling to wish Bran would die quickly.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Joffrey complains that the wolf howling is keeping him awake at night, which I'm sure it probably is and Sandor offers to kill it. Joffrey likes this idea "Send a dog to kill dog!" </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">At this point, Tyrion enters the scene, and he and Sandor have a bit of what feels like familiar hostile byplay with Sandor pretending not to see Tyrion to amuse Joffrey and Tyrion being annoyed by it. Tyrion gives Joffrey some good advice about his role as a future King (that he should go offer his comfort to the Starks) but when Joffrey demurs, Tyrion slaps him in the face, tells him not to say another word, and then slaps him again when Joffrey says he'll tell his mother, thus ensuring that Joffrey will never do what Tyrion suggests. (NB: the first time I read the series, I was totally Team Tyrion in the first book, and so it never struck me that Tyrion sabotages himself consistently with his nephew. He doesn't like Joff and Joff doesn't like him, and to a certain degree, that can't ever change because Cersei is Joffrey's mother and she loathes Tyrion. BUT within those parameters, Tyrion surely has his own share of Lannister pride and does not ever go out of his way to make any of his advice more palatable. Joffrey is a messed-up kid, no doubt, but there are also literally no adults in his life who are good models or good parents AT ALL. Cersei, Tyrion and Jaime all got the Tywin Lannister Is My Dad treatment, with Cersei getting the misogyny and Tyrion getting the contempt for being disabled. Good times!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tyrion explains - yet again - what Joffrey needs to do regarding the Starks (tell them how sorry he is, how much he wants to be of service to them, etc.) I think Tyrion is just trying to be the good family man, to leave a good impression on the Starks, especially since Joff is Sansa's betrothed, so some day Bran will be his brother-in-law, etc. But given the later scene with Jaime and Cersei, I also wonder if Tyrion thinks Joffrey's visit to the Starks will help allay their suspicions. (Ironically, it turns out that Joffrey's paying some dude to murder Bran in his sleep is what causes the suspicion that Bran didn't just fall off the tower, which leads directly to Tyrion's ordeal in the Vale. So there's that!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">After Joff leaves, Sandor tells Tyrion that the prince will remember all of this. And Tyrion thinks that Sandor's terrifying dog-shaped helm looks better than Sandor's "hideously burned face." The first sign that Tyrion isn't always sympathetic to "cripples, bastards, and broken things." (Then again, and to be fair, Sandor isn't exactly Mr. Simpatico to Tyrion either!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tyrion asks where Jaime is, and Sandor tells him that he's breakfasting with the Queen. Tyrion leaves, thinking "he pitied the first knight to try the Hound today. The man did have a temper." (But ... we've not really seen any evidence of the Hound's temper - all the emotional posturing - and slapping - was actually coming from Tyrion in the preceding scene and the Hound seemed pretty calm. So this is kind of out of nowhere.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Jaime, Cersei, Tommen and Myrcella are having a "cold, cheerless meal" talking in "low, hushed voices."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tyrion asks where Robert is, and Cersei answers that Robert is with Lord Eddard having "taken their sorrow deeply to heart." </span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">"He has a large heart, our Robert," Jaime said with a lazy smile. There was very little that Jaime took seriously. Tyrion knew that about his brother, and forgave it. During all the terrible long years of his childhood, only Jaime had ever shown him the smallest measure of affection or respect, and for that Tyrion was willing to forgive him almost anything.</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Well, let's unpack THIS paragaph. First of all, since we're primed to find Tyrion sympathetic - or at least the most sympathetic of the Lannisters - both from his earlier interaction with Jon, and his advice to Joffrey earlier in this chapter (and let's not forget his bibliophile tendencies), the revelation that Jaime is the only person who's ever been nice to Tyrion in his entire life is a crucial one. It doesn't change what Jaime did to Bran, of course, but at least we're given a glimpse that there might be something more to him. Secondly, of course, Tyrion says he's prepared to forgive Jaime almost anything (including tossing their host's son out of a window because by the end of this conversation, Tyrion definitely suspects Jaime and Cersei had something to do with Bran's fall) because of the way that Jaime has always treated Tyrion. Which is obviously a very human reaction, from someone who's been starved for love and affection his whole life, but also makes it very clear that Tyrion shares the Lannister mindset of "us versus the rest of the world" though in Tyrion's case it's more "me versus the rest of the world." And lastly, later books will make clear that Tyrion absolutely has no idea what Jaime does or doesn't take seriously because Jaime has never shared very much of his experience of guarding Aerys or why he killed Aerys with Tyrion. Which means that Tyrion has no idea that Jaime really did - at some point - believe in honor and idealism and all the rest. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Moving along, because at some point, this will be longer than the chapter itself ... Tyrion reveals his own insecurities by noticing how similar Cersei and Jaime look (and that they've dressed alike as well), and wonders how he'd feel about a twin. </span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Bad enough to face himself in a looking glass every day. Another him was a thought too dreadful to contemplate.</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And those two sentences just make me ache for Tyrion - imagine being the youngest, unwanted, "deformed" (in his world) sibling of two of the most beautiful people in your country, and on top of that having been told fairly constantly that the reason you don't have a mother is because she died giving birth to you and on top of that having Tywin Lannister, who managed to mess up even the one golden child he values the highest, let alone his daughter and the last-born, unattractive and disabled child, and that's even before the whole Tysha thing happened. No wonder Tyrion has self-esteem issues that it would take a century of therapy to work out. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tommen interrupts the (quite justifiable and neatly summarized) pity party by asking about Bran whose sickroom Tyrion visited the night before. Tommen is a sweet kid who doesn't want Brandon to die. Jaime muses that Ned had a brother called Brandon too, murdered by Aerys (who for some reason, possibly because this book was written in 1996, is just called Targaryen a lot in this first book. Just something I noticed this time around!) Of course, since Jaime apparently has never told either Tyrion or Cersei how Brandon died his comment is only interesting in hindsight (either that, or Martin didn't know he was going to have Jaime be a witness to the death of Brandon until he wrote A Clash of Kings.) Anyway, eenteresting ...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tyrion throws a little truth bomb at everyone saying that according to the maester, Tommen may live. Myrcella and Tommen are both happy at the news, but Tyrion catches a glance between Jaime and Cersei that arouses his suspicions. Then Cersei solidifies them by saying that it's no mercy for Bran to live, and it's cruel to let him linger in pain. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Myrcella asks if Bran will get better, leading Tyrion to reflect that Myrcella is as lovely as Cersei on the outside, and a lot nicer on the inside. Aww, it's nice that at least two of the incest babies are decent, good children - it makes Ned's later desire not to see them murdered for being their parents kids that much more sympathetic. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Cersei questions Tyrion closely on the probability of Bran's waking up (dun dun dun!) and Tyrion mentions that the direwolf seems to be keeping Bran alive. Cersei shudders at the thought of the direwolves and says she won't have any of them coming south, which, at least for Lady, probably would have been best! Jaime says Cersei won't be able to stop the wolves coming south because they follow the girls everywhere. (Again, nooooooooo!! Girls, leave them at Winterfell! Pleeeeease!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tyrion reveals that he's not returning to King's Landing but going to visit the Wall instead. Jaime jokingly asks if he's planning on taking the black, and I just have to quote Tyrion because it's funny and self-deprecating and - now, after reading the other four books - also very sad:</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">"What, me, celibate? The whores would go begging from Dorne to Casterly Rock. No, I just want to stand on top of the Wall and piss off the edge of the world."</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Apparently, incest and attempted murder of a minor are fine with Cersei but talk of pissing isn’t, so she huffs off with the kids and leaves Jaime and Tyrion with a little brother-bonding time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Jaime speculates that Ned won’t want to leave Winterfell with his son crippled and uncertain of living. Tyron says Robert will command that Ned goes with him, and that there’s nothing Ned can do for Bran anyway. </span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“He could end his torment,” Jaime said. “I would, if it were my son. It would be a mercy.”</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Wow, it’s a good thing Jaime’s not that close with his own kids because mercy killing your kids … um … (unless this is either foreshadowing for Jaime having to end Tome’s torment at some point or else foreshadowing for the abandoned outline plot of Jaime taking the throne after killing Joffrey? I dunno!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">MORE FORESHADOWING that I feel absolutely confident really is foreshadowing:</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Even if the boy does live, he will be a cripple. Worse than a cripple. A grotesque. Give me a good clean death.”</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">So how’d that work out for <i>you, </i>Jaime? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tyrion, of course, disagrees with Jaime, saying that life is full of possibilities even for those who are not 100% physically whole. He adds that he hopes Bran does wake, because he (Tyrion) would be most interested in what Bran has to say. I think Tyrion’s worked out a good chunk of what actually happened to Bran (or at least that Bran’s fall is connected to Jaime and Cersei), and he’s tweaking Jaime’s nose here for that comment about wishing to die rather than being a cripple or grotesque. (Again, poor Tyrion - if that’s the kind of thing he has to hear from the family member who actually cares about him … man, those family dinners must have been something!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Jaime wonders whose side Tyrion is on, and Tyrion is sassy right back:</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Why, Jaime, my sweet brother,” he said, “you wound me. You know how much I love my family</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">.</span>”</i></blockquote>
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Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-8359443162596245712015-09-21T11:28:00.002-07:002015-09-21T11:29:17.892-07:00Other halves ... or better halves? Jaime, Cersei and BrienneI’ve jumped ahead a bit in my reread to reread the “good” bits of A Feast for Crows (that is to say, I like the entire novel, but I was really interested in focusing on the Jaime, Cersei and Brienne chapters), and specifically in talking about Jaime’s last chapter where he throws Cersei’s letter onto the fire.<br />
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From the beginning of Jaime’s POV, Martin has juxtaposed Jaime, Cersei and Brienne for us, and the burning of Cersei’s letter is another of these instances, (though not as immediately obvious as it was with Jaime’s weirwood dream in which Cersei takes away the “only light in the world” and leaves him in darkness but then Brienne lights that darkness with her glowing blue sword - Oathkeeper - or maybe Lightbringer?)<br />
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Still, the parallels between Jaime’s being sent away from Brienne by Roose Bolton, and returning for her when she is in mortal danger and Jaime’s being sent away from Cersei by Cersei and refusing to return for her when she begs are completely intentional.<br />
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Jaime leaves Brienne to an uncertain fate to return to Cersei, and then dreams of her, as a beauty, as a knight, and as his champion against the vengeful ghosts of Rhaegar and his Kingsguard brethren. Because of his dream, he returns and intervenes in a sort of mock “trial by combat” between Brienne and the bear. (“Mock” only because the intent was to mock Brienne AND because there’s no chance that she’s coming out alive - her innocence or guilt are not at stake because she has committed no crime and because Hoat doesn’t care about justice in any form anyway.)<br />
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Unlike Cersei, Brienne doesn’t ask for help; Jaime provides it of his own free will (once he’s ascertained that she cannot help herself which is one of the things I love so much about the bear pit … Jaime has every faith that given the right weapon, Brienne could defeat the bear.) Jaime’s intervention is spectacularly Jaime-like, showing the same reckless courage that drove him to try and fight his way to Robb at the Whispering Wood and the same impulsiveness that led him to throw Bran from the tower (in other words, the same qualities that have always shaped Jaime are used here for a good purpose - saving Brienne - rather than for a terrible one.)<br />
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Jaime has no plan when he leaps into the bear pit other than to put his body between Brienne and the bear. We’re inside his head, so we know that at the moment when he makes that wild jump, he’s hasn’t calculated that Steelshanks Walton fears Roose Bolton enough that he’ll save Jaime and by default, Brienne as well. His immediate impulse is to throw himself into danger alongside Brienne, to die with her if he can’t save her. (“If you want her, go get her.” So he did.)<br />
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In contrast, Jaime doesn’t seem particularly interested in dying for or with Cersei by the end of Feast. We’ve seen time and again that Jaime cannot fight with his left hand so what Cersei is asking of him is, in fact, to die (and then she will also die presumably.) He thinks back on his decision in Dance and there’s a cold rationality to his thoughts that never comes up with the bearpit. He can’t answer the question of why he went back for Brienne, but he knows very well why he didn’t go back for Cersei. “Even if he had gone back, he could not hope to save her. She was guilty of every treason laid against her, and he was short a sword hand.”<br />
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Some of Jaime’s indifference stems from his belief that Cersei has made her own bed (ignoring good advice from both Kevan and Jaime, trusting the untrustworthy Aurane Waters and Littlefinger), some of it is sexual jealousy (the toxic refrain of Lancel, and Kettleblack and Moonboy), and a lot of it is finally recognizing a deep truth about their relationship: he always loved her far more single-mindedly than she loved him and that a great deal of what he loved was an illusion that he created in order to justify the terrible things he did on behalf of that love. That is to say, I do think Cersei loves Jaime (or at any rate, the Jaime she sees in her head - the beautiful boy who is the best swordsman in Westeros and who does her bidding, rather than the aging, crippled man who has begun to think for himself), but she also loves a lot of other people/things. In her own emotionally-crippled-by-being-Tywin-Lannister’s-child way, Cersei loves her children, and of course, she loves power and being Queen, and we know that she would have happily married Rhaegar; Jaime, in contrast, loved Cersei (and Tyrion) and that was basically it.<br />
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The other truth about Jaime’s and Cersei’s relationship - which Jaime also has slowly come to recognize - is that their love is built on a false image that each has of the other, an image created and shaped in huge part by their father. It’s no coincidence that the last time they have sex is in front of Joffrey’s body, when sex is the only thing with which they can still reach other because neither Jaime nor Cersei can comprehend the depth of loss that the other is feeling, making a mockery of Cersei’s belief that Jaime is “her other half.” Even as they are physically reunited in that scene, they are emotionally worlds apart. Just before Jaime burns Cersei’s letter, he dreams of his mother, who weeps when she says that Tywin wanted Jaime to be a great knight, Cersei to be a queen, and both to be so strong and brave and beautiful that no one would ever laugh at them, when the reality is that Jaime is a cripple, and Cersei is a terrible queen, and both of them have or will be mercilessly mocked. Jaime experienced this with the Bloody Mummers; Cersei will experience it during her Walk of Shame (and in both instances, as much as we, the readers, might have wanted both Jaime and Cersei to be “punished” for their evil deeds, the punishment is so unsatisfying and so unjust - as it is not for the actual crimes they’ve committed - that leaves a terrible taste in our mouths.)<br />
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Throughout Feast, Jaime’s POVs swing between the world-view of the man who loved Cersei and that of the man who rediscovered something of himself while he was with Brienne. In fact, more than a few times, Jaime’s chapters are physically sandwiched between those of Cersei and Brienne so while some of this is just an artifact of splitting Feast/Dance into two books, it’s also a very interesting contrast between the two women: Cersei driven close to madness by her paranoia (in some ways justified, in others not) versus Brienne, driven inexorably to the terrible choice that Stoneheart gives her; Cersei, who wants to be Queen but who has no sense of what it means to rule or that she has any responsibility to the ruled versus Brienne, who lives the suffering that the commonfolk endure and sees the price of a ruined country (and who, as best she can, being one lone woman, does try to put things right); Cersei, whose response to the intense misogyny of the society she lives in is to internalize that misogyny, who gives women to Qyburn so that he can create a monster for her, versus Brienne who risks her own life in a hopeless battle to save an inn full of children from monsters who rape and murder children.<br />
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And then there’s Jaime, who begins to shift from one side of the scale to the other, morally speaking. Jaime, who is torn between his love for Cersei and his still-intact physical desire for her and his willingness to do anything for her and for that love, versus the Jaime who once wanted to be Ser Arthur Dayne. Brienne is not Jaime’s “path to redemption” or his salvation (only Jaime can save Jaime), but what she is for him is a mirror into what he once was - the boy he thinks died just as surely as Aerys did. Jaime’s first interactions with Brienne, before he is maimed, often involve his trying to break her idealism, trying to make her see the world as the wretched place that he believes it is (in much the same way that Sandor Clegane voices his contempt for the knighthood and its supposed ideals to Sansa Stark.) And then, gradually, because of Brienne, Jaime realizes that it actually IS possible to live in the world and to know it and to still try to be true to the core of yourself, because that’s what Brienne does.<br />
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And maybe that’s really all that’s left to you in the end - that lonely dark path where you keep trying to do the right thing even when everything’s been stripped away from you - Brienne faces that moment, both when she defends the children at the inn, and when she is brought before Stoneheart, and in a subtler way, Jaime faces it too, when he realizes that he gave up his honor for the false coin of Cersei’s love. Even his Aunt Genna thinks he’ll be the Kingslayer until he dies, and yet there’s a part of Jaime that won’t give up on being Goldenhand the Just, despite what everyone thinks. What a tragic irony that the only person who genuinely believes Jaime has changed (even more, perhaps than Jaime himself believes it!) has, I think, sworn an oath to kill Jaime.Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-28451390000202695052015-08-30T14:06:00.000-07:002015-08-30T14:06:13.130-07:00A Game of Thrones - Bran II (Chapter 8)<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; orphans: auto; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px;">
“The things I do for love” - and we come to the fateful moment when Bran discovers the Queen and her brother are a little bit closer than they should be. Jaime Lannister may not get a POV until Book 3, but his actions - fifteen years earlier with Aerys and now - drive the story to a considerable extent. (And because I love Jaime and this is SUCH a pivotal chapter, it got really long!<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><strike style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sorry.</strike><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>No, I’m not! Also, it’s taken me FOREVER to do this (like, literally seven months, I think) because I wanted to do this chapter justice.)</div>
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Without further ado … the chapter at hand:</div>
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Everyone in Winterfell goes hunting because Robert wants wild boar for supper (oh, Robert, that taste for boar is going to get you killed someday. Well, that and your in-laws!) It’s the day before Bran and Sansa and Arya are due to accompany their father south to Kings Landing; Bran feels a little resentful that he’s too young to go on the hunt and has been left behind with Jon, Rickon (the baby) and the girls. He decides not to look for Jon because Jon “seemed to be angry at everyone these days. Bran did not know why.” (Hmmm, guess that the Night’s Watch plan sounded less exciting to Jon when it became a reality.)</div>
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Bran’s been dying to go on this big adventure, and there’s a really heartbreaking passage about how Bran wants to be a knight, and even aspires to becoming a member of the Kingsguard because he’s a big Kingsguard fanboy and knows all the great stories about the KG of olden times (as well as more recent members like Ser Arthur Dayne and Gerold Hightower and Ser Barristan the Bold.) The actual Kingsguard who are in Winterfell are a bit disappointing to Bran, though. Only Ser Jaime looks “like the knights in the stories” but according to Robb he doesn’t count because he killed the mad king (and also will shortly throw Bran off a tower!)</div>
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Now that it’s actually time to go, though, Bran realizes he’s going to miss Winterfell horribly, and as he goes to say his goodbyes, “all of a sudden, Bran just wanted to sit down and cry.” So he decides that instead of saying goodbye to everyone he’ll just go for a final climb of the walls and towers of Winterfell.</div>
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We learn that Bran hasn’t named his wolf yet, unlike his siblings whose wolves all have names. I have to think this is significant, like Bran can’t think of a name for his animal because he hasn’t found his path yet.</div>
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Also significant: “the heart tree had always frightened him; trees ought not to have eyes, Bran thought, or leaves that looked like hands.” Oh, Bran, you are going to end up living in a tree (and maybe turning into one.) This just seems like a crueler and crueler fate!</div>
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Bran’s wolf howls as he climbs, in some kind of warning that Bran completely ignores. Again, an interesting comparison of Winterfell and the trees that will loom so important later on: “[Winterfell[ had grown over the centuries like some monstrous stone-tree … and its branches were gnarled and thick and twisted, its roots sunk deep into the earth.” Between this, and the hot springs (which I think have to do with volcanic activity inimical to dragons), and the fact that the same guy (Brandon the Builder) built both Winterfell AND the Wall, I really think Winterfell the place, as well as the Starks themselves, are hugely significant in the fight against the others.</div>
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Bran thinks being up high over Winterfell makes him feel like the lord of the castle, he can see everyone and everything without their knowing he’s there. Later he says that climbing was “almost like being invisible.” (Kind of like when he’s looking into the weirwoods, hmmm?) We learn that Bran’s mother (rightly) fears that he’ll hurt himself climbing and that the family have tried various strategies to keep him from continuing to climb, but something deeper drives him to keep doing it. (I think it’s interesting that Old Nan’s scary story is about a “bad little boy who climbed too high and was struck down by lightning, and how afterward the crows came to peck out his eyes.” Maybe I’m reading too much into this but I was struck by this story because hey, look here’s Bran, climbing too high, struck down by Jaime Lannister and afterwards the three-eyed crow takes him to the man who has a “thousand eyes and one.”)</div>
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Bran heads for the ruined tower of the the First Keep, the oldest part Winterfell. It’s almost as though something is drawing him towards his doom (maybe I’m reading too much into this but I don’t know!) He hears voices, Cersei and Jaime arguing, though he doesn’t know it. Even if they weren’t doing the naked mambo when Bran sees them, their conversation is treasonous enough.</div>
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Cersei tells Jaime that she doesn’t like the appointment of Ned as Hand and wants Jaime instead. “Gods forbid,” Jaime says. He doesn’t want the honor, because there’s too much work involved. (I actually liked the show’s dialogue for this bit much better - “their days are too long, their lives are too short” really sounds like a Jaime-ism!)</div>
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Cersei points out that Ned’s appointment as Hand puts them in danger, because Robert loves him like a brother. Jaime reminds her that Robert can’t stand his brother (“Stannis would be enough to give anyone indigestion” Hee! That’s the Jaime I love!)</div>
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Jaime says that he prefers “honorable enemies rather than ambitious ones” like Littlefinger or one of Robert’s brothers. Again, interesting that even though there’s no hint that Stannis, Renly or Littlefinger are aware of Cerise’s and Jaime’s treasonous incestuous adultery, Jaime counts them all as enemies. (I guess “everyone who isn’t us” is an enemy indeed!)</div>
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Bran realizes that these mysterious voices are talking about his father (and given that he recognizes the purport of their conversation, at the very least it would have made for some awkward times in Winterfell if he’d mentioned that to his dad, even if Jaime and Cersei weren’t naked and and having sex!)</div>
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Cersei is already exhibiting a bit of paranoia, insisting that since Ned has never had any interest in the South, the fact that he’s planning to leave Winterfell<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">must<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>mean that he’s going to move against the Lannisters. Jaime’s actually quite sensible here saying that there are a hundred reasons why Ned might take up Robert’s offer to be Hand: “Duty. Honor. He yearns to write his name large across the book of history, to get away from his wife, or both. Perhaps he just wants to be warm for once in his life.” (Again, from what we learn about Jaime later on in the series, I think this is really interesting and revealing that before he starts being facetious about Ned, he mentions possible reasons for Ned’s actions that we later learn are projections of his own long-dead desires — duty, honor, and the fame of his virtues, rather than the notoriety that Jaime earned by being the Kingslayer.)</div>
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Cersei continues to fret about the fact that Lysa Arryn is Catelyn’s sister and Jaime reassures her that if Lysa had known anything pertinent about the incest she would have already told Robert (though unbeknownst to both siblings, Lysa has accused them to her sister and Ned of the murder of Jon Arryn, rather than the incest.) The narrative deliberately obscures whether Jaime and Cersei’s crimes include murder, though we know that the crime<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">they’re<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>talking about is their relationship, and not the murder of Jon Arryn.</div>
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Cersei again counters that Lysa wouldn’t have dared accuse the Lannisters of the as-yet-nameless crime because Tywin was going to foster young Robert Arryn at Casterly Rock and Lysa would have feared for his life. Jaime makes a bitter and deprecating remark about mothers, and how “birthing does something to your minds. You are all mad.” (Again, I’m probably reading far more into this than I should but of course Cersei does descend into a kind of madness when Joffrey dies in her arms.)</div>
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Meanwhile, Bran is trying to figure out how to get out of his unintended eavesdropping without alerting the two people having this conversation. He doesn’t quite understand what they’re talking about, but he definitely understands that this is quite a dangerous thing to be listening to, and it gets even more dangerous.</div>
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Oddly, Jaime praises Ned’s honor, telling Cersei she’s reading way too much into the appointment of Ned, because what Jaime sees is a man who’d rather die than betray his king. (Totally unlike the Kingslayer, of course!)</div>
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Cersei believes Ned’s loyalty extends only to Robert and questions what happens when Joffrey is King (Dun dun FORESHADOWING!!!) and in fact says the sooner Joff is King, the better because Robert’s getting restive and is still in love with Lyanna. Now<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">this<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>is definitely edging towards treason and Bran is truly frightened. He wants to find his brothers, but not before he finds out who’s talking so he has some concrete information to give them. Again, I realized reading carefully that even Jaime’s and Cesei’s conversation is pretty bad for them if relayed to a third party, let alone the fact that they’re having sex.</div>
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Just as Bran draws closer to the room it’s clear that the sexy times portion of the even has begun, and Bran gets to the window just in time to see the naked “wrestling.” Bran can’t tell who the couple is because Jaime’s back is blocking his view, but it’s clear they’re kissing and though Bran is too young to recognize that Cersei’s moans indicate pleasure rather than pain. Cersei, in the throes of passion, pulls Jaime’s head down to her breast and that’s when Bran realizes that he’s seeing the queen, and inadvertently makes a noise which makes Cersei open her eyes and seals poor Bran’s fate.</div>
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“Everything happened at once then.”</div>
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Bran tries to pull himself up and in his panic about what he’s seen, he slips and starts to fall. He catches the ledge with one hand and dangles there as Cersei and Jaime come to the window above him, and now Bran recognizes Cerise’s lover as well. Cersei says “he<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">saw<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>us” and Bran’s fingers start to slip again. Jaime actually tells Bran to take his hand before he falls and pull Bran onto the ledge one-handed even as Cersei asks Jaime what he’s doing.</div>
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Jaime asks how old Bran is, and Bran says he’s seven, before Jaime looks over at Cersei and shoves Bran out the window. “The things I do for love,” he said<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">with loathing</i>. (Emphasis mine). I think this ties into what Jaime tells Cersei much later: he’s not ashamed of loving her, only of the things he’s done to hide it. And what he does to Bran is, of course, the absolute worst thing he’s ever done for love. It’s very interesting Jaime’s<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">first<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>instinct was actually to save Bran (Bran notices that his fingernails have dug deep gouges into Jaime’s forearm) when he could have simply let him fall which seems to be why Cersei’s asking what Jaime is doing when he pulls Bran up onto the ledge. If Bran falls, problem solved! Instead we get a first glimpse at the dichotomy of Jaime Lannister - first he saves Bran, then he tries to murder him. (On the show, of course, there was none of the saving, only the shove but I think the first action of pulling Bran up onto the ledge is meant to tell us something about Jaime. It makes the push in a way more callous - he actively tries to kill the boy instead of simply not intervening as Bran falls - but it also makes clearer that he is a man in deep conflict with himself. And it’s much more Jaime-like to take a direct action than to stand by and watch something happen - Littlefinger would have just let Bran fall, but Jaime saves him and then gives him that shove.)</div>
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As Bran falls, the crows cry out for corn and his wolf howls in the distance. And things will never be the same again; Bran’s fall is the beginning of the fall of Winterfell itself. (Though like Bran, I think Winterfell is crippled and nearly destroyed but will nonetheless be an important catalyst in the war against the Others. If we ever get to read about that but that’s a rant for another day …)</div>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-38706451878059614252015-06-25T19:07:00.006-07:002016-06-05T14:33:14.816-07:00A Game of Thrones - Arya I (Chapter 7)<div class="text post-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #0e0000; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">“The woman is important too.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This chapter is our introduction to Arya Stark, and it’s mostly about character (rather than providing me with fodder for wacky theories and/or foreshadowing for the future.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The first thing I want to say is that there seems to be this weird fault-line in fandom involving the Stark sisters: apparently if you like Arya, you cannot like Sansa and vice versa, and I think this potentially based on a great oversimplification particularly of Arya’s character. There’s the sense (fostered in part by the show) that Arya despises “girly” things and thinks that other girls are “stupid” but that’s not in the text, certainly not here. What we get is an Arya who <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">wishes </i>she could be better at the things her society and upbringing consider valuable assets in a highborn lady, although that is of course not <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">all </i>that she wishes. (Brienne, when we meet her and get inside her head, presents a similar case.) Only, in Arya’s case, she has the misfortune to both not be very good at things like embroidery <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">and </i>have a sister who is, from Arya’s perspective, flawless at doing those kinds of things.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As cute as Arya’s introduction was on the show, it established her as that “not like other girls/other girls are stupid” character right from the beginning, and Book!Arya is just more subtly drawn than that. (She doesn’t come in and show up her brother at archery, and in this chapter Jon tells her she’s too skinny to fight even with practice swords, a salutary dose of realism!!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In other words, I think at least early on, Martin manages to avoid the pitfalls of making Arya “special/not like other girls” which is something that a lot of fantasy series tend to do, devaluing “girly” things and valorizing girls who are tomboys. Arya is much more complicated than this reductionist view - she actually wants to fit in, but she also wants to do her own thing, and the conflict between those two goals is one of the most interesting aspects of her character.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now that I’ve had my polemic, onto the actual chapter:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“It wasn’t fair. Sansa had everything. Sansa was two years older; maybe by the time Arya had been born, there had been nothing left. Often it felt that way. Sansa could sew and dance and sing. She wrote poetry. She knew how to dress. She played the high harp <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">and </i>the bells. Worse, she was beautiful. Sansa had gotten their mother’s fine high cheekbones and the thick auburn hair of the Tullys… It hurt that the one thing Arya could do better than her sister was ride a horse. Well, that and manage a household. Sansa had never had much of a head for figures.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Alas, poor Arya is confined in a sewing room with her sister, Princess Myrcella and Septa Mordane, being mortified by how bad her own sewing. (OK, there is maybe a tiny bit of foreshadowing here with our learning that Septa Mordane told Catelyn that Arya “has thehands of a blacksmith.” Aww, Gendry!!!)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Arya is a sharp observer who notices that Princess Myrcella’s stitches are no less crooked than her own, not that Septa Mordane would ever comment on that. She overhears Sansa, Jeyne Poole and Beth Cassel talking about “the prince.” Arya soury notes that Sansa got to sit with the “tall handsome one” while Arya had to sit with the “little fat one” (but honestly, Arya really did get the better part of that deal.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Sansa blushes at the thought of being queen, and bristles when Arya says Jon thinks Joffrey looks like a girl. Sansa says that Jon is jealous of Joffrey because Jon is a bastard, and Arya defends Jon, saying “he’s our brother” which Sansa corrects to “half-brother.” The altercation draws Septa Mordane’s attention, and she tells Arya her embroidery will not do at all. This is all too much mortification for poor Arya and she bolts from the room.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">This passage doesn’t suggest that Arya despises her sister’s accomplishments and girly ways, but that she wishes <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">she </i>had some share of Sansa’s beauty, etc., a perfectly natural reaction for a younger sister. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">However, Arya does have one thing that’s all her own, and that’s her direwolf Nymeria, “who loved her, even if no one else did.” (Ha! The hyperbole of a nine-year-old!!) Arya has, interestingly, named her direwolf after the warrior queen from Essos.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Arya decides to go watch the princes and her brothers practicing fighting under the eye of Ser Rodrick Castle, rather than waiting for inevitable punishment for running away from her sewing lesson. She and Jon watch the boys from a hidden alcove; Tommen and Bran spar at first, with Robb calling out encouragement and Theon with “a look of wry contempt on his face.” (So that’s twice we’ve seen Theon being kind of shitty, what with kicking the decapitated head of Gared, and now being contemptuous of little boys.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We learn that Arya and Jon are especially close, in part because they are the only two Stark kids who look like Ned. Robb, Sansa, Bran and Rickon all take after the Tullys, with “easy smiles and fire in their hair.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jon is excluded from the arms practice because “bastards are not allowed to damage young princes.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jon notes that Joffrey’s coat of arms is halved between Baratheon and Lannister symbols. “The Lannisters are proud … He makes his mother’s House equal in honor to the King’s.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“The woman is important too!” Arya says, in probably the most significant line of this chapter. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Bran and Tommen’s bout ends with Tommen rolling in the dirt (awww!) and when Ser Rodrick asks Robb and Joffrey if they want to go another round, Joffrey asks for live steel instead of practice swords. Ser Rodrick, who is responsible (and who’ll be in trouble if Joffrey ends up with any cuts) says he’ll let the boys have tourney swords, not live steel. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At this, “a man strange to Arya, a tall knight with black hair and burn scard on his face, pushed forward in front of the prince.” (DUN DUN DUN! Although we’ve briefly glimpsed Sandor Clegane through Eddard’s eyes, this is the first time he speaks, and of course, he will play such a huge role in Arya’s - and Sansa’s - storylines so I find it really interesting to see how Arya first perceives him.) He seems to be every inch the loyal dog who does exactly what Joffrey commands, telling Ser Rodrick that Joffrey is his prince. “Who are you to tell him he may not have an edge on his sword, ser?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Sandor tells Robb that he killed his first man at age twelve, and not with a blunt sword, getting Robb to the point where he too demands live steel. Ser Rodrik won’t budge, and at this Joffrey tells Robb to come see him when he (Robb) is older. Things nearly come to blows, as Robb curses the prince, but Theon keeps Robb from actually hitting Joffrey and Joffrey gets tired of the game and withdraws. Ned’s belief - expressed in the preceding chapter - that Bran’s presence in King’s Landing and sweetness of nature will somehow soften the young Lannisters toward the Starks doesn’t seem born out, at least not with Joffrey, who seems very clearly to want to establish his dominance. It’s our first real sign that he’s trouble!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jon tells Arya to run back to her room and teases her that she’ll be sewing through the long winter, and when spring comes, “they will find your body with a needle still locked tight between your frozen fingers.” (I *REALLY* hope this isn’t foreshadowing anything for poor Arya.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Arya says she hates needlework and that “it’s not fair.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Nothing is fair,” Jon tells her (and in the very next chapter, we will learn the truth of that in this universe!) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When poor Arya returns to her room, she finds both Septa Mordane <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">and </i>her mother waiting for her. Uh oh!!</span></div>
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Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-73037285998635150792014-12-23T09:36:00.001-08:002015-06-25T19:11:30.830-07:00Was that all I was? A sword hand?<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Well, now I've given in to the dark side, and this is going to be a Jaime-Brienne blog for the next little while until I get back to writing chapter summaries, I'm bringing over some little things I wrote elsewhere so they're all in one place.</span><br />
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<header class="post-header"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"> </span></header><header class="post-header"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">WARNING: A STORM OF SWORDS SPOILERS (you're fine if you've watched through Season 4 of "Game of Thrones") </span></header><header class="post-header"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></header><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Before he sends Brienne off on her mission to find Sansa, Jaime gives
Brienne a princely gift: a Valyrian steel sword remade from Ned’s great
sword Ice. Through the magic that clings to Valyrian swords, the new
sword, half the size of the old one, is also completely changed in
appearance: Ned’s Ice is described as a smoky grey, while the sword
Jaime ripples with the colors of “blood and black” (which are the
Targaryen colors, by the way!) and the light on its edge is tinged red. (My personal theory is that somehow this sword is going to end up in Jon Snow's hands, because he - like the sword is a Stark/Targaryen mixture - and because he keeps thinking that Longclaw is the "wrong" Valyrian steel sword for him. But that's by the by ...)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">It occurs to me that Jaime, like the sword he gives Brienne, is
broken and then reforged (by suffering and by proximity to Brienne) into
something different. Jaime goes into a captivity as Cersei’s double
with his full complement of limbs and of Lannister arrogance; he comes
out of it crippled, bearded, with silver in his hair, and with a
resuscitated belief in the ideals he once held.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Oathkeeper is Jaime’s father’s gift to
him, a bribe for Jaime to abandon his Kingsguard oaths and to do what
Tywin wants. I find it fascinating that Jaime chooses a name for this
sword that’s so unlike the other named Valyrian steel swords we
encounter. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">They are usually named for some attribute of the House to
which they belong, e.g. the Targaryens have a connection with dragons and their sword is Blackfyre; the Starks’
house motto is “Winter is coming” and they have Ice; the Mormonts who live on Bear Island have Longclaw, and the
"golden lions" of Lannisters had Brightroar, now lost. Failing these house-connected names, the Valyrian swords we know about have sort of generic
“strike fear into people’s hearts” kind of name like Heartsbane, Widow’s
Wail, Red Rain or Lady Forlorn. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span">But Jaime chooses a name that </span>is
quite different from either of these conventions: Oathkeeper (like Arthur Dayne's Dawn and Azor Ahai's Lightbringer) is a
promise of better things to come, rather than a threat or a reflection of familial glory. When Jaime calls the sword he gives Brienne "Oathkeeper", he is indicating his changed intentions (to keep the vow he made to Lady Catelyn, when once he thought resentfully that vows made under duress weren't "real") and he is also rebuking his father, who
wants him to break his oaths for the greater glory of the Lannisters. <span class="Apple-style-span">When
Brienne, who witnessed Jaime broken and reforged, accepts that reforged
sword named Oathkeeper from a man who intends to keep his vows, in a
sense, she</span> <i>becomes</i> his sword-hand, wielding Jaime’s sword to do what he physically cannot.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Brienne promises Jaime that she’ll find Sansa Stark “for her lady
mother’s sake. And for yours” but she makes no solemn vows or oaths to
Jaime and he asks for none, partly because Jaime, of all people, knows
that vows are traps, but partly because how do you ask for a vow from a
part of yourself?</span></div>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-17653422934136854392014-12-14T07:50:00.005-08:002015-06-25T19:13:04.314-07:00I dreamed of you ... (Some thoughts on Jaime, Brienne, the bearpit, the weirwood dream and other assorted miscellany)<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">And so I return to this oft-abandoned blog ... I haven't given up on the detailed reread project, but I think I need the fire (and ice) of a publication date for <i>The Winds of Winter </i>to get back to that. In the meantime, I've been thinking so much about Jaime and Brienne (my two favorite characters in the series) so let me leap forward, throw in a bunch of spoilers and talk about <b>them</b> for a bit. (WARNING: There are huge spoilers for <i>A Storm of Swords </i>under the break!)</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />
<br />
A while ago, I came across <a data-mce-href="http://www.ilanmochari.com/blog-july-2009.html" href="http://www.ilanmochari.com/blog-july-2009.html" target="_blank">this discussion of Jaime’s fever dream before the BEARPIT</a>. And
I disagree in a very long and involved way: I think <b>Brienne</b>, not Cersei,
is the most significant person in Jaime’s fever dream.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Looking
at Jaime’s dream as solely being about Cersei gives short shrift to the
huge part of the dream narrative in which Cersei is no longer present;
she actually leaves him very shortly after the beginning of the dream,
even though he begs her to stay. Moreover, Cersei is not the only
Lannister present in the tomb-like setting under Casterly Rock. Jaime
says the darkness is filled with ghosts of Lannisters without counting
(and soon-to-be ghosts, like Tywin and Joffrey) and with his family come
the crushing weight of his father’s expectations and disappointment in
Jaime; Jaime’s guilty love for Cersei and the things he’s done for that
love; and Joffrey, the bad seed product of that guilty love. But <i>just as important </i>(if
not more so in terms of pages focused on it) is Jaime’s guilt about
betraying Rhaegar by not protecting his family and betraying his vows to
the Kingsguard by killing Aerys. (Remember it all comes back to
Aerys!)<br /><br />And who does Jaime interact with the most in his dream?
Not Cersei, not the Kingsguard and Rhaegar, but Brienne. First,
Brienne’s shining sword replaces the light provided by Cersei, the torch
that Jaime previously thinks is the “only light in the world.” Brienne
not only replaces Cersei as the source of light (the “blue” light of her
sword keeps the darkness at bay) but she also protects him against the
accusatory phantoms of Jaime’s other “family”, his former Kingsguard
brothers.<br /><br />But she’s more than replacement Cersei or protector:
it’s hugely significant that, in a dream that includes Cersei (Jaime’s
ideal of beauty) and Ser Arthur Dayne (Jaime’s ideal of
knighthood/honor), Jaime sees BRIENNE as “almost a beauty, almost a
knight.” In Jaime’s dream, Brienne symbolizes and incorporates both
things that Jaime longs for: love/beauty (represented by Cersei) AND
honor (represented by Arthur Dayne and Jaime’s Kingsguard brothers who
died for Rhaegar.) And she’s also his way out of the dark tomb of his
dream: in this world largely populated by the dead, Brienne is alive
(Jaime thinks that she’s warm, a characteristic he often associates with
her) and her light keeps burning after Jaime’s goes out. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Somehow,
in the logic of dreams, Jaime recognizes that Brienne is key to his own
life on a symbolic level. Can he ever be Arthur Dayne again or is he
always doomed to be the Smiling Knight? </span><span class="Apple-style-span">Going
back to rescue Brienne is Jaime being true to the better side of his
nature, acting as he failed to act to protect Rhaegar’s wife and
children but the same act, in its entirely impulsive nature (jumping
into the bearpit without a hand, a sword or a plan) also incorporates
the side of Jaime that does “the things I do for love.” Jaime’s dream is
the impetus for that action, and in acting</span>, Jaime is finally
able to integrate both sides of his character: his capacity for love and
loyalty (and for doing awful - and in this one instance, heroic -
things for love) and his long-dormant belief in chivalry and honor not
being merely empty words to disguise the brutal reality of life in
Westeros. So “I dreamed of you” becomes not a throwaway line to replace
the cruel quips he might have made, but a simple, though also profound,
truth.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">(Also I think that the
reviewer has completely overlooked the significance of Jaime sleeping on
a weirwood stump when he has this dream. We know weirwoods have special
powers elsewhere and the same seems to be true here: think about
Brienne continuously asking in Jaime’s dream about the “bear.” Jaime
doesn’t know she’s bitten off Vargo’s ear and is condemned to die in the
bearpit when he had the dream; he thinks he’s going to ransom her and
save her from being raped is all. And Tywin gives Jaime a sword, just as
he will later give Jaime Ned Stark’s sword in King’s Landing. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span">So
I think there may be a prophetic element to Jaime’s seeing Tywin and
Joffrey - soon to be among the Lannister dead - alongside Cersei. Note
that Tyrion, Tommen and Myrcella are all absent from the dream, which
suggests a) that Jaime doesn’t have conflicted feelings about them; or
b) they are not going to die. I wonder whether the replacement of
Cersei’s light by Brienne’s means that Cersei will die before Jaime,
perhaps because he has “abandoned” her to follow Brienne, just as
choosing to go back and save Brienne from the bearpit made Jaime miss
the Purple Wedding. He thinks as he rides away from Harrenhal that </span>“If
they made haste, he might even arrive in time for Joffrey’s wedding”
but then, of course, he loses all that time riding back and arrives
after Joffrey’s death.)</span>Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-45387938864003397902014-08-13T12:16:00.000-07:002015-08-30T12:52:07.818-07:00A Game of Thrones - Catelyn II (Chapter 6)<div style="color: #444444; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Sorry, this has taken me FOREVER because I have so much to say about this chapter, including a brand new Crack!Theory about stuff. (At this rate, though, I should be finishing up <i>A Game of Thrones </i>just about when <i>The Winds of Winter </i>comes out. Yay?)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Without further ado, my crack!theory. So at the beginning of this chapter, Catelyn spends quite a lot of time describing Winterfell. And while I initially (and on subsequent rereads) always sped up to the whole “Lannister conspiracy to murder Jon Arryn” section of this chapter, something struck me this time around:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />“The castle had been built over natural hot springs, and scading waters rushed through its walls and chambers like blood through a man’s body, driving the chill from the stone halls, filling the glass gardens with a moist warmth, keeping the earth from freezing.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Ned doesn’t like the heat. “The Starks were made for the cold, he would tell her, and she would laugh and tell him in that case they had certainly built their castle in the wrong place.”<br /><b>BUT ... they have totally NOT built their castle in the wrong place and here is why:</b></span><br />
<ul style="color: #444444; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<li><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Most obviously, that natural source of warmth is probably why Winterfell has survived all those winters and may secure its survival for the coming one. </span></li>
</ul>
<ul style="color: #444444; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">
<li><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Hot springs are often associated with volcanic activity, as are dragons (Valyria from which dragons came seems to have some kind of analogy to the regions of intense volcanic activity in our own world) and dragonglass (obsidian, which is cooled lava.) In other words, volcanoes and their byproducts seem to be inimical to the Others and the various creepy things associated with the reign of winter. </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">So what if the “Stone Dragon” that Melisandre hopes to wake is in fact not at Dragonstone (despite its name) but at <i>Winterfell </i>and the “king’s blood” needed to wake it isn’t that of Stannis Baratheon or Robert Baratheon’s bastards but instead the blood of the Starks, who were once Kings in the North AND have the blood of the First Men in their veins, etc. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />I can’t help but shake the feeling that Winterfell is critically important to the storyline in more ways than simply being our jumping off point/home of the Starks, that somehow the place itself will play a role in the final confrontations between “ice” and “fire” because Winterfell itself unites those two elements in its buildings. Winterfell was supposedly built by Bran the Builder, who is also credited with constructing the Wall to keep the Others out - while the Wall has obvious magical properties, thus far, Winterfell hasn’t demonstrated any, but ... wouldn’t it be strange if Brandon Stark didn’t put ANY of the safeguards he put on the Wall onto the home of his own family? Hmmmm!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="height: auto; max-width: 100%;"><img class="mcePageBreak mceItemNoResize" data-mce-src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%;" /></span><br />OK, moving on from my crack theory to an actual discussion of the chapter.<span style="height: auto; max-width: 100%;"><img class="mcePageBreak mceItemNoResize" data-mce-src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%;" /></span> <span style="height: auto; max-width: 100%;"><img class="mcePageBreak mceItemNoResize" data-mce-src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%;" /><img class="mcePageBreak mceItemNoResize" data-mce-src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%;" /><img class="mcePageBreak mceItemNoResize" data-mce-src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" style="border: 0px; height: auto; max-width: 100%;" /></span>Mercifully (given the other sex scenes Martin’s written in this series) we come in on the aftermath of Ned’s “urgent” lovemaking to Catelyn. Catelyn thinks that she could still give Ned another son (so ... just to emphasize, these people are all in the mid- to late-30s at this point and were VERY young during Robert’s Rebellion - Ned was Brienne’s age; Jaime, Cersei, Catelyn were a little younger. They were all just a little bit older than the kids of the main story, and I think we always have to remember that when we think about what they did/didn't do during the Rebellion.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Ned wants to refuse Robert’s offer to be Hand but Cat reminds him that the King came all this way to give Ned this signal honor and that he might well take it very much amiss if Ned refuses him. “Robert would never harm me or any of mine,” Ned insists (a direwolf pup that answers to the name of “Lady” would beg to differ), but Catelyn wisely points out that “You knew the man ... the king is a stranger to you.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Cat is somewhat more politically savvy than Ned, perhaps because she was Hoster Tully’s heir for a while and perhaps because - as we will have cause to learn later - the Riverlands were more of a sinkhole of competing interests and jockeying for position than more sheltered Winterfell where there weren’t threats to Stark supremacy for many, many years. (Plus, Ned wasn’t raised to be Rickard Stark’s heir, so it’s possible he just avoided the whole tricky issue of politics.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Poor Ned thinks this too, raising the spectre of his dead brother. “It was all meant for Brandon. You, Winterfell, everything. He was born to be a King’s Hand and a father to queens. I never asked for this cup to pass to me.” (I see yourJesus reference there, Mr. Martin!)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Catelyn is practical and has no time for this mournful dwelling in the past, telling Ned that like it or not, the responsibility for Winterfell and his family’s welfare <i>is </i>Ned’s and he needs to own it. But she also thinks that Brandon’s shadow lies between herself and Ned, as well as “the shadow of the woman he would not name, the woman who had borne him his bastard son.” I actually wonder if some of Ned’s almost fanatical insistence on keeping Jon’s mother’s name such a secret is because - if she is Lyanna, as I very much think is the case - he feels tremendous guilt that he could save neither his older brother nor his sister and thus will do anything including paint himself as the father of a bastard to save his sister's child. And even if Jon's mother was simply a Random Lady Upon Whom Ned Totally Uncharacteristically Fathered a Bastard Child after all, then perhaps he feels that she was someone whose love was for Ned, a relationship that he had for <i>himself</i>, not something/someone he only got because Brandon was murdered. Anyway, all of this stuff makes Ned and Catelyn so much more complicated than the bluff, good-hearted Northern matriarch/patriarch we got on the TV show version of events.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Maester Luwin interrupts this trip down memory lane with an urgent message from Lysa Arryn, in which Lysa, at Petyr Baelish’s instigation, blames the Lannisters for the death of Jon Arryn. (As an aside, I love that Catelyn just walks around naked without a second thought because it’s her husband and her OB/GYN :D She’s just so practical!) Catelyn thinks that Lysa’s message means that Ned <i>must </i>accede to Robert’s request to become his Hand, so he can go south and find out the truth about Jon Arryn’s death (and not arouse the Lannisters’ suspicions about Ned’s motives), while Ned thinks that this is all the more reason to avoid King’s Landing. Maester Luwin joins his voice to Cat’s, suggesting that Ned will have power as the Hand of the King, so he can bring Jon Arryn’s killers to justice and protect Lysa and her son. (Alas, Ned was actually right in thinking that it was a bad idea to go south, but of course, Maester Luwin and Cat had no way of knowing that Lysa was totally lying to them, and anyway, Jaime trying to murder Bran kind of changed the situation anyway.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Ned gives in, though he reminds Cat and Maester Luwin that his father and brother rode south and never came home again. “A different time,” Maester Luwin said. “A different king.” (Same end result though :()</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Ned tells Cat she will stay in Winterfell to govern the North because Robb is too young, and there must always be a Stark in Winterfell. Obviously, Ned trusts Catelyn’s judgment since he also tells her that “He [Robb] must learn to rule, and I will not be here for him. Make him part of your councils. He must be ready when his time comes.” (So you know, nuts to the idea that Catelyn is just a hysterical momma bear/evil stepmother - obviously Ned not only thinks she is perfectly capable of running Winterfell/the North in his absence, but also that she is the best guide for his son and heir to learn how to rule!)<br />As an additional blow, Ned tells Cat that he will take Sansa, Arya and Bran south with him - Sansa will have to marry Joffrey (who, again, thus far has not shown any inclination of being anything other than kind of a spoiled brat), and Arya needs to learn how to be a lady in the south before it’s time for her to marry. As for Bran, Ned thinks that he’s so sweet-natured that he will make sure there’s no bad blood between the Baratheon princes and Robb. All this will supposedly ensure the safety of the Stark family.<br />And then there’s the thorny issue of Jon Snow. Catelyn remembers that she wasn’t that angry or upset that Ned had fathered a child “he had a man’s needs, after all, and they had spent that year apart... he was welcome to whatever solace he might find between battles. And if his seed quickened, she expected he would see to the child’s needs.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />No, what angers Catelyn still is that Ned has insisted on raising Jon at Winterfell and acknowledging him publicly as his son AND that Jon and his wetnurse were actually at Winterfell before Cat ever got there with Robb. So it’s the singularity of Ned’s <i>treatment </i>of his bastard that is the issue here, not that Ned fathered one in the first place. And indeed, it’s clear from all the other bastard children that we meet in the series, that, until their fathers have NO other heirs (I’m looking at you, Ramsay Snow!), it’s unprecedented for them to be raised alongside the lord’s trueborn heirs. Even Robert’s nobly-born bastard Edric Storm isn’t raised at court (Cersei would kill him, for one thing :P) but off at Storm’s End. The only place where things are different is Dorne, of course, but it will be a long three books before we learn about that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Catelyn only had rumors to guide her and most of them focused on Ser Arthur Dayne and his sister Ashara, but when Cat asked Ned about her, she got “the only time in all their years that Ned had ever frightened her.” Ned refused to say anything, and in fact dismissively told Cat that Jon “is my blood and that is all you need to know.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Is it any wonder that, believing that Ned loved Jon’s mother so much he couldn’t bear to speak her name (which is kind of true if Lyanna was his mother, but just not in the way Cat thinks), Catelyn can’t find it in her heart to *LOVE* Jon? There’s no sense that she’s consistently horrible to him, just that she doesn’t want to have the constant reminder rubbed in her face that her husband loved some other woman so much that he won’t be parted from that other woman’s child EVER. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Poor Cat gets so much grief from fandom for not being a good mom to Jon and ... man, that’s like expecting her to be a SAINT, from my perspective. Not only is she expected to swallow the fact that Ned wants to raise his bastard in his home alongside Catelyn’s children (which, again, is totally contrary to the custom of most of Westeros) but she’s also warned not to ever ask anything about his mother AND there’s no divorce option for her, no way for her to walk out without losing her own children. So she does what she does, which is to put up with Jon because that’s what Ned wants, and while, sure, it would be awesome and incredibly noble of Catelyn to also love Jon, it’s totally human and understandable that she <b>just doesn’t</b>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Now, if Jon is actually Rhaegar and Lyanna’s child, then this situation becomes all the more tragic. Maybe Ned could have told Cat the truth but her hostility to Jon (such as it is, and we don’t actually know how deep that runs) provided a much-needed protective coloration for the child. If Cat had known that Ned wasn’t unfaithful, that he was tending to his <i>sister’s </i>child, then her attitude toward Jon would surely have been different, and while that difference might have made Jon’s childhood happier and Catelyn happier about him, it would also, I think, have made it that much more likely that people would wonder about this whole deal and start asking questions about Jon’s mom that could be dangerous for Jon. After all, as unprecedented as it is for Ned to raise his bastard in Winterfell, it would probably be even MORE unprecedented for his wife to be all lovey-dovey with the kid.) This is all a long-winded way of saying that this is a horrible, painful awful situation for all three parties, and yet another repercussion of events that none of them had any hand in creating. Awww!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />So ... Catelyn finally gets to say that with Ned absent, along with three of their children, she won’t have Jon stay in Winterfell. Ned cannot risk taking Jon south to Robert’s court - especially if Jon is Rhaegar and Lyanna’s son - and accuses Catelyn of being cruel. (Though of course she doesn’t know the situation and considering that Ned has consistently refused to be parted from Jon in the past, I fail to see why Catelyn would foresee Ned’s utter opposition to the idea of taking Jon with him. I also fail to see why Ned wouldn’t think of, I don’t know, dropping Jon off with Howland Reed or something like that!) Anyway, Maester Luwin comes up with the “perfect” solution of sending Jon to join the Night’s Watch per Jon’s own request to Benjen. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Catelyn tells herself that Jon can be like a son to Benjen and moreover, this way, he’ll never father children who can contest with Robb’s (or Bran’s or Rickon’s) children for Winterfell. This might seem far-fetched from what we know at this point when initially reading the books, but the Blackfyre rebellions are legendary in Westeros, and it’s not far-fetched at all to think that there are rumors about the death of Roose Bolton’s son Domeric, and that Cat knows all about them. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />Ned decides that it’s for the best after all. (And perhaps it is, because who would think to look for Rhaegar’s child at the Wall? Though quite honestly, I would think that Maester Luwin at least would be aware that the Wall is full of violent criminals and Ned surely knows that too, given that his brother Benjen has surely talked about who exactly the Night's Watch gets to recruit. I'm not sure whether Catelyn would know such a thing necessarily, but I do wonder why Ned doesn't say something about the fact that he doesn't want Jon mixed in with the rapists and dregs of the King's Landing dungeons. Or maybe that's just something that only the actual folks at the Wall know about? I don't know, it just seems strange to me that no one brings this up as an argument for Jon's NOT joining the Night's Watch, and only focuses on his age and lack of sexual experience as Benjen did in the previous chapter!)<br />Anyway, Ned agrees that Jon will go to the Wall and that he will go to King's Landing, and it's extra poignant and sad because even though Ned and Cat don't know this, we're looking at the beginning of the end for the happy Stark family at Winterfell.</span></div>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-86078004137925537952014-08-01T21:29:00.003-07:002015-08-30T12:51:33.082-07:00A Game of Thrones - Jon I (Chapter 5)“There were times - not many, but a few - when Jon Snow was
glad he was a bastard. As he filled his wine cup once more from a
passing flagon, it struck him that this might be one of them.”<br />
<br />
Aww, poor Emo!Teenaged!Jon Snow!! But more importantly, this is the chapter that introduces us to the Imp and the Kingslayer.<br />
<img class="mcePageBreak mceItemNoResize" data-mce-src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" src="https://secure.assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/vendor/tiny_mce_3_5_10/themes/advanced/img/trans.gif" /><br />
<br />
We’ve
seen Jon through the eyes of his younger brother Bran, and now we get
to meet him ourselves (and note his observations on the King’s party.)
Jon thinks Cersei is as beautiful as reputed, though he notices that he
can “see through her smile.” I’m not thinking this shows Jon as some
flawless judge of character, given that we already know Cersei is not
exactly thrilled to be at Winterfell with Robert’s BFF and the Stark
family, exacerbated by Robert’s rather publicly leaving her in the
courtyard of Winterfell to go visit Lyanna Stark’s grave the moment he
arrived. However, there’s a theme of “these things are not what they
seem to be” running through this chapter, particularly in regards to the
royal party.<br />
<br />
“The king was a great disappointment to Jon.”
Ned’s apparently talked up “the peerless Robert Baratheon” as this
legendary warrior but Jon only sees a “fat man, red-faced under his
beard, sweating through his silks.” If only Jon knew that he’s echoing
Ned’s disappointment as voiced in the previous chapter. Robert’s
putative children come in after Robert and Cersei, accompanied by Stark
kids; Jon is dismissive of Tommen and Myrcella (“insipid”) and then
Joffrey who has a tangle of blond curls and his mother’s (and
father’s!!) deep green eyes. The most Jon can find to criticize in
Joffrey (who’s gallingly taller than Jon OR Robb, though he’s younger
than both) is his “pouty” lips and disdainful glances at Winterfell.<br />
<br />
And
then come the Queen’s brothers. Jaime’s charisma is self-evident, and I
think it’s no accident that our fullest description (including the fact
that he has two nicknames: “Lion of Lannister” to his face and
“Kingslayer” behind his back) of Jaime to date comes from Jon, whose
path will in so many ways mirror Jaime’s. Like Jaime, Jon will join a
corrupt/degraded institution at a very young age, be rather
disillusioned (though Jaime’s disillusionment was certainly harsher than
Jon’s finding out that there were criminals in the Night’s Watch!) and
be forced to choose between conflicting vows (or perhaps more accurately
between what is morally the right thing to do versus what is the
outward appearance of honor, in Jon's case with his sojourn with the
Wildlings.)<br />
<br />
“Ser Jaime Lannister was twin to Queen Cersei; tall
and golden, with flashing green eyes and a smile that cut like a
knife... Jon found it hard to look away from him. <i>This is what a king should look like,</i>
he thought to himself as the man passed.”<br />
<br />
Again, we get this idea
of things not being what they seem: the Kingslayer looks like a king,
the King looks like a sweaty drunk ...<br />
<br />
Jon is also fascinated by
Tyrion, perhaps because he’s never seen a dwarf before. “All that the
gods had given to Cersei and Jaime, they had denied Tyrion.” And yet, at
this point, and as we’ll see later in the chapter, Tyrion is by far the
best of the Lannisters, despite his ugliness.<br />
<br />
Benjen and Theon
round out the group at the high table, with Benjen giving Jon a smile
and Theon ignoring him, which Jon thinks is pretty par for the course.<br />
<br />
Jon
keeps trying to convince himself that he’s happy not to be at the main
table with the royals, but clearly he’s not happy about the distinction
made between him and his legitimate half-brothers and sisters. He tells
Benjen that it was Lady Stark’s decision that it might be insulting to
the royal family to be seated with a bastard. OK, so now I need to
digress because this particular moment is often introduced as evidence
that Catelyn Stark is a horrible, evil stepmother person - and first of
all, clearly this is completely different from Jon’s usual experiences,
which are that he eats with his brothers/sisters “most times.” So Jon is
clearly almost <i>never </i>treated like Cinderella forced to skulk
in the ashes or whatever people like to throw in as how horrible Catelyn
is to him. And on top of that, <i>she is right </i>that the royal family - or Cersei in particular - would take it amiss to have Ned’s bastard placed near <i>her </i>children.
Queen Cersei already been humiliated by Robert on this visit, and
Catelyn is quite right to see that avoiding any additional grounds for
hostility from Cersei is probably a good idea.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, we
only have Jon’s word for it that it was Catelyn’s decision anyway -
either Ned concurred (because if he hadn’t, Jon would have been eating
with the King and his family) OR Jon’s banishment to the depths of the
hall was actually at Ned’s instigation. If Jon is who I very firmly
think he is (i.e. Lyanna’s son by Rhaegar Targaryen), then the <i>last </i>thing
Ned wants to do is arouse any suspicions, or have this kid who looks
soooo much like his dead sister (Arya and Jon supposedly look very much
alike and Arya is said to resemble Lyanna so I’m extrapolating) or cause
Robert to ask him uncomfortable questions about Jon’s mother that would
force Ned into outright falsehoods and have the additional negative
effects of being deeply insulting to Catelyn. To sum up, while Jon
believes it’s Catelyn’s doing that he’s not sitting with the rest of the
family, I’m not so sure he’s reading things right, even though he says
that “a bastard has to learn to notice things, to read the truth that
people hid behind their eyes.”<br />
<br />
Anyway, family banquet aside, Jon
begs Benjen to take him to the Wall, and Benjen quite rightly suggests
that Jon is maybe not old enough to make such a life-changing decision. <br />
<br />
“If you knew what the oath would cost you, you might be less eager to pay the price, son.”<br />
<br />
I’m
pretty curious about Benjen, like I really want to know what he makes
of Ned’s having a bastard, or if he knows the truth about Jon’s
parentage - I don’t think he really does, because I think Ned told NO
ONE! - and when <i>he</i> joined the Night’s Watch and what moved <i>him </i>to
do so. Was it before or after Robert’s Rebellion? It must have been
after, since there’s “always a Stark at Winterfell,” and Brandon was
dead and Ned was off chasing Lyanna and fighting Robert’s war. And
Benjen would have been Ned’s heir at that point too, right? So ... what
made him decide to join the NW AFTER Ned came home? All questions I will
never know the answer to, but also a tribute to how sympathetic this
relatively minor character is! I don’t believe Benjen is Coldhands, by
the way, for a variety of reasons.<br />
<br />
But then Benjen loses me a bit
by telling Jon that after he’s fathered a few bastards, he may feel
differently about joining the Night’s Watch. First of all, because it’s
clear that he really doesn’t understand Jon if he thinks Jon would
father bastards, and secondly because, although it’s all of a piece with
Wetseros thinking, I kind of abhor the idea that sexual experience is
what differentiates adulthood from childhood which is what Benjen seems
to be saying here.<br />
<br />
Anyway, NO ONE UNDERSTANDS poor Jon, so he
heads out into the yard to have a good cry in private except instead of
privacy, he gets Tyrion Lannister, who is instantly sympathetic (though
I’m glad Martin rethought the tumbling skills!) and recognizes in Jon a
fellow outsider in a way that Jon’s own uncle, who loves him dearly, has
just proven completely incapable of doing.<br />
<br />
“Never forget what you
are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can
never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used
to hurt you.” (Tyrion, of course, signally forgets his own advice during
his relationship with Shae, but that’s for another chapter.)<br />
<br />
And
then he gets off a couple more of his great lines. First: “All dwarfs
are bastards in their father’s eyes,” which is something Jon needs to
hear, i.e. that he is not the only person in this position and in fact
in some ways his life is better than others’ because his father (or
“father”) clearly loves him and we’ve seen throughout this chapter that
he has loving relationships with his siblings and uncle and that his
father’s men truly care for him. Cheer up, emo Jon, things are only
going to get worse for you from here.<br />
<br />
Tyrion leaves Jon with a bit of parting wisdom: “All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs.”<br />
<br />
One
final Very Interesting Thing: as Tyrion leaves, the shadow he casts is
elongated “and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood as tall as a
king.” So Jon, disappointed in the actual King his father loves so
much, has now seen BOTH Lannister brothers as kings - Jaime earlier, and
Tyrion here - which I find interesting. It’s also interesting that one
of the despised Lannisters ends up being the person who shows Jon the
most empathy in this chapter. It’s the first inkling we’re getting that
all is not always what it seems, since thus far, the Starks are
positioned as the Heroes and the Lannisters as their antagonists.Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-23408435371212709362014-08-01T21:25:00.002-07:002015-08-30T12:51:03.176-07:00A Game of Thrones - Eddard I (Chapter 4)<div class="text post-content">
The royal party arrives at
Winterfell, and Ned is forced to confront the fact that his beloved
friend Robert has become grossly self-indulgent since he became King. We
also get some backstory on the civil war that put Robert on the throne
and a fateful offer from Robert to Ned.<br />
<br />
Of great interest to me as a member of the Kingslayer fan club: we
see Jaime first through Ned’s eyes, though his initial thought about
Jaime isn’t particularly pejorative (“Ser Jaime Lannister with hair as
bright as beaten gold”) and Jaime is interestingly introduced in the
same sentence as Sandor Clegane, which leads me to believe these two men
are also linked in the narrative (I’ll talk more about that when I get
to Bran’s dream.)<br />
<br />
Robert seems “almost a stranger to Ned” - we learn that Ned last saw
him during the Greyjoy rebellion which was “only” nine years ago, but
Robert has changed a lot physically since then. Cersei’s wheelhouse
doesn’t fit through the gates of Winterfell so she enters on foot -
which has to be humiliating for someone as proud as she is; then she is
further humiliated by Robert’s immediate request to go and see Lyanna’s
grave in the crypts.<br />
<br />
Robert complains about how huge, empty and cold the North is and
talks about how ripe and luscious everything is in the South at the tail
end of a long summer. There’s a real emphasis on the size and
separateness of the North - foreshadowing/remembrance of the Starks as
Kings in the North.<br />
<br />
As Ned walks past the graves of the earliest Starks, he remembers
that “By ancient custom an iron longsword had been laid across the lap
of each who had been Lord of Winterfell, to keep the vengeful spirits in
their crypts.” I find this SUPER interesting, because what are those
spirits vengeful about? Is this just a sort of bone-deep memory of the
Others and the Starks as one of the outposts of humanity against them,
or are we subtly being told that, for all the current generation of
Starks seeming to be pretty decent fellas, their ancient ancestors were
far more of a mixed bag? There’s a mention of the Starks as Kings in the
North before the Targaryens came.<br />
<br />
(OK, so this is one fantasy trope that I think Martin also falls
guilty to - I’m annoyed by how fantasy dynasties are always totally
static, the same families rule for thousands of years until the
Targaryens arrived, which is really not the case in any kind of
real-world setting. If you look at any real-world history, it’s
enormously unlikely that the same political structures will be in place
for thousands of years, let alone the same dynastic rule: families don’t
have children or everyone dies of the Black Plague or there are only
daughters so they end up changing the family name, or they’re overthrown
by their disgruntled vassals or whatever. It seems highly unlikely to
me that the Starks have been the overlords of the North forever and that
the Umbers/Boltons/Manderlys/etc. have been their underlings forever
without jockeying for position - same thing with the other dynasties in
the series. The only change seems to have come with the Targaryens as
overlords, and the end of the River Kings dying out at Harrenhal and
being replaced by families that were never royal, like the Tullys and in
the Reach, the Tyrells.)<br />
<br />
We get backstory on Brandon and Rickard’s deaths (and of course,
having read Jaime’s account of them, we know that Ned never knew the
full horror of how they died. Maybe he would have felt differently about
Jaime if he had, who knows?) Ned still thinks of Brandon as “the true
heir, the eldest, born to rule” even after fifteen years of ruling the
North rather well. On the show, I missed this sense of diffidence from
Ned, of almost being an impostor in his brother’s shoes (as Lord of
Winterfell and as Catelyn’s husband); Show!Ned is considerably more
self-righteous than Book!Ned and much more insulting of everyone who
isn’t a northerner. More on this later too! He also thinks that Robert
loved Lyanna more than he (Ned) did, but I’m not buying it. Robert seems
to have loved an image of sixteen-year-old Lyanna, of course, but it’s
not his love for Lyanna that Robert dreams of, but punishing Rhaegar -
he says he kills Rhaegar every night in his dreams and a thousand deaths
wouldn’t be enough punishment for what he did to Lyanna.<br />
<br />
The first inklings of Lyanna’s fate and the secret Ned is guarding:
Martin cleverly makes us think that Ned’s remembrance of the promise he
made to Lyanna is about her being buried at Winterfell, but there is the
mention of a room that smelled of blood and roses (we don’t know about
the roses from the Harrenhal tournament yet and how the blue rose will
symbolize Jon Snow, but we’ve already got little subtle hints that there
may be more going on with this story.<br />
<br />
Robert tells Ned that Jon Arryn sickened quickly, they discuss Lysa
and how she’s seemed a little unhinged after Jon’s death and we learn
that Jon had agreed to foster Lysa’s son with Tywin Lannister (Ned
sourly thinks that he would “sooner entrust a child to a pit viper than
to Lord Tywin” with a cryptic remembrance that some old wounds never
heal - he’s clearly thinking of Tywin’s sack of King’s Landing and the
murder of Rhaegar’s children and the real source of his dislike of the
Lannisters.)<br />
<br />
And then Robert drops the bomb he came all the way to Winterfell to
deliver - he wants Ned to be Hand of the King in Jon Arryn’s place, and
as a bonus, he wants Sansa to marry Joffrey when they are both old
enough. I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Ned for agreeing to the
betrothal, but a) it doesn’t seem like he has much choice (Robert is
pretty wilful and Ned himself thinks that he doesn’t know the guy that
well any more, even at this early stage of Robert’s visit); b) he
doesn’t know Joffrey at all; c) Robert has just offered up that Ned’s
daughter will be Queen of Westeros (as his sister Lyanna would have been
had she married Robert, although I suppose there would have been no
rebellion so Robert wouldn’t have been King anyway. In fact, I’ve kind
of wondered about Lord Stark, Warden of the North, betrothing his only
daughter to the Baratheon heir, because until the rebellion they seemed
like a fairly minor house at least compared to Hoster Tully’s house in
the Riverlands. Was it just Ned’s friendship/Jon Arryn’s fostering the
kid that made Robert a suitable bridegroom for Lyanna?)<br />
Anyway, Ned doesn’t want to be Hand at all, and asks for more time to
consider Robert’s offer - although I dislike Robert, I do find the fact
that he openly admits that he doesn’t want to do the work of being King
and his honest appraisal of himself rather hilarious. At least he is
conscientious enough about being King that he’s tried to find the best
guy for the job. “If I wanted to honor you, I’d let you retire. I am
planning to make you run the kingdom and fight wars while I eat and
drink and wench myself into an early grave.”<br />
<br />
Memorable lines: “The King eats… and the Hand takes the shit.”</div>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-10235846767285129772014-08-01T21:24:00.002-07:002015-08-30T12:50:48.092-07:00A Game of Thrones - Daenerys I (Chapter 3)<ul>
<li>Our introduction to Dany - she’s very much the meek,
oppressed little girl in this chapter (and Viserys is quite horrible)
but she’s still sensible enough to realize that Magister Illyrio of
Pentos isn’t doing all this stuff for them for free. She asks Viserys
“what does he want from us?” and doesn’t believe that it’s all because
he thinks Viserys will reward him when he’s someday King of Westeros.</li>
<li>For Dany Westeros is a fairy tale about stone towers and
blue-grey mountains and knights; she’s rather similar to another girl
who’s just a bit younger than she is: Sansa Stark. Viserys has also told
her the dramatic tale of their flight to Dragonstone and the sack of
King’s Landing. (I would also like to point out that even Viserys has
apparently told Dany that “the Kingslayer opened Father’s throat with a
golden sword” - so the TV show’s insistence that Jaime stabbed Aerys in
the back irks me as a Jaime fan. Plus, come on, slitting his throat like
a sacrificial lamb isn’t good enought?</li>
<li>Like many other mothers in the series, Dany’s mother
(who was also her aunt!) died birthing her, and “Viserys had never
forgiven her” (echoes of Cersei and Tyrion, with no Jaime to balance
that out). </li>
<li>Dany doesn’t remember her father (since she was born after his
death) and Viserys has clearly not told her about his viciousness and
cruelty. (We’ll learn later from one of Jaime’s POVs that Dany is the
product of Aerys’s brutal rape of Rhaella, which lends an extra
poignancy to her intervention with Drogo to try and stop the rape of the
Lhazareen women later in this book.)</li>
<li>For Dany home is the house with the red door in Braavos to which the
loyal Ser Willem Darry took her. And she longs to be able to go back to
that more innocent place. </li>
<li>As the years went on, the Targaryen Prince and Princess lost all
their money (and Viserys is known as “the Beggar King” in Pentos.) </li>
<li>Pentos is a “free” city (officially no slavery) but there are
slaves; Illyrio’s help Dany prepare for her meeting with Khal Drogo and
give her the skinny on the Dothraki, although as we find out later, a
lot of what they tell her is completely untrue (there’s no palace with
200 rooms in Vaes Dothrak!) </li>
<li>Dany assumed she’d marry Viserys because that’s what the Targaryens
did. “The line must be kept pure…” (But Dany’s brother Rhaegar married
Elia Martell so that wasn’t strictly true.) Doomed Valyria was a
high-status place (full of people with fantasy-novel coloring of silver
hair and purple eyes, apparently!) because everyone keeps placing an
emphasis on how Dany reflects “the blood of Old Valyria”.</li>
<li>The golden torc Dany wears reminds her of one of the slave girls
telling her that Khal Drogo is so rich even his slaves wear golden
collars. </li>
<li>Viserys keeps droning on about how he’s going to go back to Westeros
with the army Khal Drogo promised him and find all these Targaryen
supporters. He promises to personally kill both Robert and Jaime because
they killed Rhaegar and Aerys. The idea is hilarious, to be honest.
Poor deluded Viserys!</li>
<li>Significantly for later, the Pentoshi apparently worship the Lord of
Light (whom the Red Priests promise will defend Pentos from a million
Dothraki) but they prefer to just co-opt the Dothraki with luxury. Khal
Drogo has his own palace in Pentos; apparently the Pentoshi buy off the
horselords rather than fighting them. It seems like a win-win for
everyone except the slaves the Dothraki bring to sell in Pentos.</li>
<li>At Drogo’s palace, Dany is uncomfortable when she realizes she’s the
only woman there. There are numerous Dothraki and others from all over
Essos, but this is also where she first meets Jorah Mormont, who is
wanted for selling poachers to a slaver. Illyrio doesn’t understand
these absurd laws, but this is the root of my issues with Jorah.</li>
<li>More importantly for the immediate future, Dany meets Khal Drogo
whose long braid indicates he’s never lost a fight. She finds him
terrifying, but Viserys has absolutely no compassion or understanding
for her fears, and she does what he tells her to - stand up straight and
“let him see that you have breasts…”</li>
</ul>
<i>Memorable Quotes/Moments</i><br />
"When they write the history of my reign, sweet sister, they will say that it began tonight." Aah, poor deluded Viserys! <br />
"We
go home with an army, sweet sister. With Khal Drogo’s army … I’d let
his whole khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all forty thousand
men, and their horses too if that was what it took to get my army." Oh,
man, I don’t even know what to say about this. It makes a golden crown
seem quite fitting for Viserys. Ugh!Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-10282278659067707912014-08-01T21:23:00.000-07:002015-08-30T12:50:32.482-07:00A Game of Thrones - Catelyn I (Chapter 2)<ul>
<li>Ned is doing some
post-execution cleanup of Ice when Catelyn brings him the news of Jon
Arryn’s death and Robert’s imminent arrival at Winterfell, complete with
Lannister queen and her brothers. The godswood makes Catelyn
uncomfortable - even after all these years, she feels like a stranger at
Winterfell, at least in the godswood. This is our first inkling about
different religions - the North worships the ancient gods of the forest
symbolized by the weirwood trees; the South worships the Seven in what
sounds like a version of church (with holy oils and priests.) We also
get our first mention of the “Children of the Forest” and the faces
carved into the weir woods, which will, of course, be hugely significant later on. </li>
<li>Ned acknowledges that Gared was so terrified of whatever it was he
saw (and that he was the fourth Night’s Watch deserter this year.) I
guess it’s too much to expect that he’d start actually asking questions
before he executes these guys because it is a bit like someone telling
me they’d seen a woolly mammoth. I wouldn’t believe it. But STILL!</li>
<li>Also, Ned apparently believes three years is old enough for Rickon
to put his fears aside and recognize that “winter is coming.” But the
words are somehow kind of rote, since a guy just told Ned that Winter
REALLY is coming apparently and yet Ned isn’t hearing the underlying
message. Which again, I don’t blame him for *too* much since obviously
the readers know much more than he does.</li>
<li>Ned and Catelyn talk about Lysa and her son, who have fled to the
Eyrie. Ned first suggests Catelyn take the children to visit their aunt
and cousin and cheer them up, but of course, since Robert is coming to
Winterfell that won’t work. I do wonder what would have happened if
Catelyn had taken Bran off to the Eyrie. Would he have climbed/fallen <i>there </i>or did the specific chain of events at Winterfell have to happen in exactly the way that they did?</li>
<li>Ned clearly dislikes the Lannisters - he calls them an “infestation”
and Cersei is “the Lannister woman” - and at this point, since he has
no idea about the incest, it’s purely based on his having found Jaime on
the throne and perhaps because Cersei took his sister Lyanna’s
“rightful” place as Robert’s queen? Because he really seems to dislike
her simply for being a Lannister, more than anything else: I get that he
hates Tywin for the Sack of King’s Landing (and the murder of Rhaegar’s
wife and children) and Jaime for being an oathbreaker, but Cersei
hasn’t done anything to Ned besides “replace” Lyanna and not be too
charming. </li>
</ul>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-40071099141189687622014-08-01T21:21:00.002-07:002015-08-30T12:50:09.660-07:00A Game of Thrones - Bran I (Chapter 1)<div class="text post-content">
"The morning had dawned clear and
cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer. They set forth
at daybreak to see a man beheaded."<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<ul>
<li>Bran goes to the execution of a Night’s Watch deserter (Gared in
the book, Will in the series). Unlike the series, Bran doesn’t hear
what Gared tells Ned about the nasty stuff north of the Wall.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Ned is much younger than his tv counterpart (only
thirty-five) and Bran reflects that his father has two sides, the loving
father who tells them fireside stories and the grim, stern Lord Stark
of Winterfell who personally executes deserters.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Theon kicks Gared’s severed head (what an introduction!)
and Jon calls him “Ass!” showing that Jon is a good judge of character.
(Another difference from the show - Theon is nineteen, so 4-5 years
older than both Jon and Robb - so there is an additional ‘humiliation’ I
guess for him to be in a way so subservient to Robb.)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>As they return to Winterfell, they find the direwolf pups
with their dead mother who has a stag’s antler stuck in her throat.
How’s that for some fun foreshadowing? Jon makes the count come right
(one pup for each legitimate Stark child) and is then rewarded for his
selflessness by finding the albino pup too.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<b>Key Lines/Moments:</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Bran asks Ned: “Can a man be brave if he’s afraid?” and Ned
responds “that is the only time a man can be brave.” It’s one of the key
question for the series: what is courage and how do you find it? We
will see all kinds of bravery in the chapters to come, not least from
Bran. I wish they had kept the placement of this line in the series
rather than having it be told in third person by Robb much later on;
it’s more touching to have Ned tell Bran, who will have so much need of
courage so soon.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Also, Ned tells Bran: “… we hold to the belief that the man
who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a
man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final
words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not
deserve to die… A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets
what death is.” It sounds really noble and good, but … I’m not sure that
Ned is entirely correct, considering that Gared didn’t “deserve” to
die, although the rules said he must. He didn’t desert the Night’s Watch
for personal gain or because he couldn’t deal with being celibate any
more, and on the series, of course, Will is a very sympathetic
character, perhaps more so than the book’s Gared. It’s also an ominous
sign that even our “heroes” are blinded (not surprisingly) by what they
think they know to be true. (Just as Ned is later blinded by his
youthful friendship for Robert into not seeing what Robert has become
and by Cersei’s gender into believing she’ll flee King’s Landing and
give up her position as queen.)</li>
</ul>
</div>
Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-7155652481400284422014-08-01T21:12:00.000-07:002014-08-01T21:12:33.193-07:00A Game of Thrones - PrologueThree men walk into a dark, scary forest …<br /><br />Ser Waymar Royce is in
command of two other members of the Night’s Watch; the three have been
tracking a group of wildlings for nine days. This section is told from
the point of view of Will, the younger of the two men under Waymar’s
command. Apparently, Will has been to a village where everyone looked
like they’d frozen to death, even though it hasn’t been extra-extra cold
yet. Gared, the older dude, suggests that, as night is falling, they
might want to head back home.<br /><br />Waymar Royce is eighteen and a
nobleman and has all the arrogance of a privileged teenager so he
ignores Will’s and Gared’s sensible observations and wants to make sure
that the wildlings are really, truly dead. As they draw closer to the
village, Will notes that he forest seems to be getting colder and
creepier by the minute. (OK, I’m a totally urban person and even the
“wilderness” of Central Park used to freak me the hell out, so by this
point, I was completely sure that something horrible was going to
happen, and I was in fact correct.) <br /><br />The growing cold and
scariness cause Gared to come close to mutiny (and if he had, he
probably would have saved at least two lives!) but he finally obeys his
commander. When they get to the village, there are no bodies on the
ground at all, and Waymar decides that Will was mistaken in his earlier
assumption that the wildings were dead. He orders Will up a tree so
just in time for Will to have a ringside seat for the upcoming carnage.<br /><br />Sure
enough, the creepy factor goes up by about one million when a shadow
emerges from the woods. ”Tall it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones,
with flesh pale as milk.” In short, not someone you’d want to meet on a
dark cold night nine days from civilization. Actually, not someone
you’d ever want to meet anywhere under any circumstances at all.<br /><br />Waymar
shows lots of courage in his sword duel with the Other, but is clearly
doomed, since he is not a supernatural being with an aura of liquid
nitrogen about him. Waymar’s sword is shattered then more of the Others
come along to join in the butchering. Finally, the merry pranksters
move along and after a long break to collect his shattered nerves Will
comes down from the tree to collect the broken sword as proof that <em>he</em> didn’t
kill the young lord, who’s lying face down with about a million wounds.
(And his lovely sable cloak is probably ruined as well! Woe!)<br /><br />When
Will turns around, the remains of the sword in his hand, Waymar Royce
is standing over him. ”His fine clothes were a tatter, his face a ruin.
A shard from his sword transfixed the blind white pupil of his left
eye. The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.”<br /><br />Uh
oh! Aaaand just like that, poor Will is dead too, because cold scary
walking zombie types rarely just want to sit down and have a cup of tea.
But cheer up, Will, no other POV character from a prologue makes it
out alive either.<br /><br />In terms of my own reaction, I was hooked
right from the prologue; I had to know more about what was going on, and
who these weird supernatural beings were and whether anyone could face
them. In a few short pages, I got to like the Night’s Watch men (making
their deaths all that much more horrible) and the sense of cold and fear
are still palpable after multiple reads. Fantastic stuff!! (Warning:
I may sound a lot like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzfCDHHYMgg" target="_blank">Austin Stevens</a> while
discussing this series and use the words “fantastic” and “incredible” a
lot. Don’t watch that video if you’re afraid of snakes by the way!)Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8430072999175569319.post-74505034988259043402014-08-01T21:10:00.000-07:002014-08-01T21:12:33.196-07:00In the game of thrones, there is no middle ground ...Re-re-reading <i>A Song of Ice and Fire </i>and hoping <i>The Winds of Winter </i>will be out before I get to the end of <i>A Dance with Dragons.</i> (With one or two chapters a week, maybe that's a reasonable goal!)<br />
<br />
There are spoilers for future books here in every post - I'm really interested in how certain things are foreshadowed early on, what the endgames might be, and in interpreting prophecies, so that's going to be a thing. And without further ado ... here we go!Regina Thornehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00167219391973327753noreply@blogger.com0